Diary of a Void

by Emi Yagi

That was six years ago, when I’d just moved to this apartment. For six years, I’d been eating my breakfast here, making myself up here every morning. . . . So many days and nights now gone, never to return, with nothing to remember them by. The steam that rose as I cooked a late dinner for myself, my favorite mascara . . . They’d vanished without a trace, without a sound, as if they’d never been there at all.

I started reading a blog called The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, and I was surprised to find that I’d seen a good number of them. But what surprised me most as I read the blog was how I couldn’t remember much of anything that had happened in those worlds. These were movies I’d seen over the past few weeks. At first, I took notes on what I was watching, but I stopped before long. I couldn’t keep up. That’s why I can’t even remember what I’ve watched anymore. It’s a blur, most of the characters who have appeared on my screen simply passing through me. Most found happiness, some met tragedy, and a few more went on their way with knowing looks on their faces, as if they just might have figured it all out.

I looked around my room. A small, seven-mat room. Tweed gloves were popping out of the pocket of the Chesterfield coat that I’d left hanging by the door all winter. The guy I went out with in college had given them to me. We started dating soon after we met in class, then broke up over the summer the year we got jobs. I guess I didn’t really like him, and that’s why I could keep wearing them. I bet I wouldn’t even notice if he walked past me on the street or at the station. The same goes for the guys who came after him, and the temps I found placements for at my old job, and the other students from college, and the classmates I used to share notes with in high school. I wondered what all those people were doing under this snow.

Maybe that’s what making a family is all about: creating an environment in which people make space for one another—maybe without even trying, just naturally, to make sure that nobody’s forgotten.