Life in Reverse

The fire snaps and crackles in the grate, sunset coloured flames dancing in the moonlight. Each one is like an artist’s brushstroke on an invisible canvas – dazzling shades of gold and angry hues of red illuminating the darkness. Somewhere in the distance I can hear church bells singing their melancholy ballad, marking the transition from one day to the next, the brassy tones of the tolling bells reaching in through the open window alongside frigid fingers of cold December air.

It’s past my bedtime.

Midnight is a dangerous hour in this house. It’s when the shadows merge together, forming vicious wolves that gnash their teeth and snarl as they crawl out of the undiscovered crevices of my brain. I fall down the steep staircases of my own thoughts, stagger through the forgotten catacombs of my mind, all the while searching for some clue that will remind me who I am and bring me back to the comforting assurance of reality and daybreak. The various nurses who come and go during the week have told me to make sure I’m asleep by now. They seem to work on the assumption that if I spend these treacherous hours wrapped in a blanket of drug induced slumber, my mind will be at ease.

As I reach for the tepid cup of tea poised on the table beside me, my arm sends a stack of leaflets tumbling to the floor. The condescending pieces of paper titled ‘Managing Dementia’ and ‘Dealing with Memory Loss’ arrive with the nurses and leave the next day with the recycling bin; I rarely give those crumpled pages the satisfaction of looking them in the eye, never mind reading them.

Yet they’ve made their mark; tomorrow is moving day. I watched, powerless to intervene, as my possessions and memories, a tangible timeline of my life, were sorted into five boxes and driven away. Somewhere inside the abyss of hideous floral carpets and musty air of a local nursing home for the elderly, those boxes are waiting for me. Soon I’ll be moving aside as a team of qualified strangers take over the reins of my everyday existence.

Somehow I’ve ended up knee deep in a second childhood. Except this time, instead of embarking on a quest to forge new memories, my journey of self discovery is going in the reverse direction – every day is a treasure hunt to discover the important moments that I seem to have lost all recollection of. When darkness falls, my map of familiarity is stolen, the things that remind me who I am are swathed in the thick cloak of night. As a result I’m washed out to sea with nothing but my own tangled thoughts for company, trying not to drown.

Tonight sleep evades me, no matter how exhausted I am from chasing it. Each time I close my eyes I feel myself falling into forgotten memories. Moments float past my eyelids, sparkling and iridescent before quickly fading into murky puddles, grey and bleak as dishwater. The endless corridor of my imagination stretches out before me; gingerly I step into its warped and twisted arms, an onslaught of childhood fantasies running out to greet me. There was the rocket I conjured, the racing car that sped through my adolescent dreams and the myriad of adventures I’d envisaged. Suddenly, the ground shakes and those visions vanish as if they'd never existed. When I try to recall them, they linger just beyond my grasp, laughing at me.

Thoughts and contemplations from many years ago rise up and enclose me in a thick copse of trees, wishes that didn’t come true hanging from them like exotic fruit. I reach out to pull one from a branch and peek inside its hard, broken shell – there is nothing there besides the faint whiff of devastation and heartbreak.

Clearly, I’m in the process of unravelling.

My joints creak and my bones are reminiscent of gates swinging on rusty hinges. The hair on my head vacated the premises long ago and my eyesight and hearing are approaching their retirement. However, it is my accelerating mental incapability which scares me the most. The abandoned road of my mind is threatening and eerie, nothing but a shady, beaten track stretching out far beyond the horizon behind me, yet in front it ends abruptly in the near distance. I struggle to match up the names and identities of the faces that hover behind my eyelids, a cruel audience of unrecognised relations observing my decline.

These days, my younger self seems more myth than reality. In my mind he is regarded as a kind of celebrity: someone I will never meet; someone who I desperately want to be like, yet for the most part their life only provides a stark contrast to my current miserable existence.

This strange memory loss seems to be proof of the detrimental effect time can have on a person. I’m old and I’m wearied and it seems like every time I blink another year of my life has been chalked up onto the prison wall. The problem with growing old is that you gather so many memories, you eventually run out of space to store them. In a childish tantrum, my mind has given up the sensible archiving system it developed years ago and thrown all my thoughts at my feet, leaving me to sift through them and recover what belongs to me. Memories get thrown out that shouldn’t be and ideas remain in my possession when I should have already waved goodbye to them...

It seems my mind has had enough of me for one lifetime.

The sunrise is obscured by wisps of silver clouds, the world still half asleep. I look around my home for one last time and notice a pile of leaflets on the floor, though I can’t remember how they got there. The condescending pieces of paper titled ‘Managing Dementia’ and ‘Dealing with Memory Loss’ look up at me with a cruel smile.

Shortlisted for the BBC Young Writers' Award 2016