It might have been in those many silent days that we sat still in snowfall that I first caught hints of something quietly changing inside.

Interior thoughts, restructuring, brain maintenance, all make some type of neural noise, but culture’s outrigger pace and frantic combustion mean you’re trying to hear in a hurricane; a watch tick in the howl and clang of an oil-bloody factory.

When the weight of cold air and saltine-cracker snow come together, there’s a window of time and space that open wide enough for me to try to understand myself. It lasts about ten minutes. What I can gather in that time, I keep.

This time, I kept looking back on my first few troubled years at the start of the new millennium; questions kept hanging themselves on each memory – big, bright, gaudy greeting cards with presumptive texts:

JUST ASKING: WHY AREN’T YOU WRITING MORE

Or

CHECKING IN: HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING IMPORTANT LATELY

Or

SEASON’S GREETINGS: YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT

And, to my horror, I realized the structure of the thing was eroding. There were questions, but no data to answer them with. Doubts, but no evidence to calm me down.

In short, I’m starting to forget my past.

I’m not talking about the big stuff. I remember the road and copper sunlight in Colorado; I remember the Armstrongs and the Iddings and the Haywards of my cul-de-sac green grass days. I remember my first bike, my first dog, my first love.

But the glue – those silent axonal partners that selflessly link and form the soft, sturdy net I know I can gracelessly fall into whenever I look back to understand the path from there to here – the glue is dissolving in places I had trusted, places I had hoped would always be there.

I don’t really remember the benign. Where were the clocks in my house? Did I have coffee in the mornings, or coca-cola? What was the tile like in the bathroom? Did the microwave oven turn clockwise or counter-clockwise when it ran?

It doesn’t feel like someone chewed through a crucial wire; nothing has snapped. It is organic, gradual, and probably normal. This may simply be the nature of memory, and likely influenced by a type of neural energy-saving: I see different versions of these same memories in my day-to-day life now, and my brain just slots them in where the old ones were.

It may be harmless – certainly there isn’t much call for three different bathroom tile memories at the same time – and I can take pride in a mind that knows what side of important is up, but in those snowy days when the low pressure dips down, when you can hear more inside your ears than you can outside, these things come to your notice.

And I’m not sure what to make of it.