Here’s my use of the The Choire Sicha Method

A Thing To Do This Coming Saturday: “Transmissions,” a Day-Long Conference on Literature and the First Thirty Years of HIV. She read the info section and scrolled the comments and replied “Not Attending” to the invite. She hadn’t checked her calendar yet, but she vaguely remembered speaking with someone about something that was coming up this weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday and, anyway,  the conference was in a city that she couldn’t picture in her mind. She was instantly free from this new opportunity and any kind of freedom feels good.  She much preferred these invites that came faceless, where she could say No without saying anything at all. A voice without a voice; what a rare, modern treat. The world today made it so much easier for her to feel caged and therefore free. Still, though, she wondered what she would have learned. She did long for an awareness of the history of the disease that was non-comedic, however terrifying that seemed at the time. Not just the disease, not even the disease at all, really; anything, everything. She wanted to devour the world. But not devour it in the way that many people use the word devour, in which something disappears inside of you, is used momentarily to fuel an interaction in which you want to impress another person who is also waiting to use something they have recently devoured on you, making room for more in and out, but in a way that it would stay inside her forever. How does one put something inside of themselves forever? There were a couple scenes that were still inside her. Not of the world, but of her small life. The time she buried the plastic baby in the mud in her back yard, how her mom’s tan cat hid, large, under their brown van, how she’d mix ingredients from the refrigerator doors that did not blend into a bowl and leave it in the sun to crack, how she made water and washcloth burritos in the bathtub, the shirt she wore on her first day of high school and how she sweat through the sleeves by 8:00 AM, how her eyes quivered closed when her Spanish teacher asked her what kind of music she liked, the overalls she wore when her first boyfriend first fingered her, how her mom trusted her to be out late on that night of all the nights. Those things were in her forever. They happened and she knew of them. But did her parents ever eat dinner? She tried to remember if her mom liked movies, or what her dad did in the mornings. She wondered if he ever went to work or came home. She knows he did come home, but did he? Maybe if she would have written it down in a notebook; a detail smaller than her life. Maybe if she would have turned it into a song. Maybe if she had a picture. Those are the ways to remember things that your mind doesn’t on its own commit. However it chooses what it does to commit. However.