When my daughter was small she would sometimes have panic attacks at bedtime. She would cry and kick her legs and hyperventilate and obsessively repeat negative phrases to herself. “I’m a terrible person,” she would say. “I don’t deserve to be in this family.” I don’t really know where any of this came from. It seemed to happen when she was overtired and overstimulated. It was like she was having a nightmare while she was still awake. The other kids never did anything like this. The attacks didn’t happen all that frequently, but when she was 10 she started seeing therapist. After a while it seemed to help. Or maybe she just grew out of it, who knows. When she was in the middle of an attack I would try anything I could think of to help her. I would hold her hand and stroke her hair. I would make her drink water and try to get her to slow her breathing. I would say I love you, and I’m proud of you, and it’s all going to be ok. I’d run through the list of everyone who loved her: her mom, her siblings, her friends. Jesus. Her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Finally I would pull out my phone and start scrolling through pictures. I would recount her whole life to her through the lens of the photo library: her birth, her first steps, funny faces, chewing on the crib, playing in the snow. Meeting her little sister, Christmas presents, beach trips, the zoo, the first day of school, and on and on. I wanted to show her how much she belonged, how my memories of her stretched back further than any of hers. Sometimes this seemed to help. We’d find something funny to laugh at, or she’d start talking about her memories of a certain day. It was a distraction more than anything, but also a message I wanted her to hear. At last she’d fall asleep, her breath calm and steady, everything right again. In the morning she would hardly remember.

She’s really doing a lot better now.

For me, I find that I have to be careful about looking through the photos. It’s like I’ve contracted the inverse condition. I’m fine as long as the memories are left undisturbed. You can traverse the structure but don’t dereference the pointers, if that makes any kind of sense. I have to be careful, like suiting up to enter the forbidden Zone. Beware the elephant’s foot. Sorry I’m mixing metaphors. When I was a kid this is what we would say: the computer crashed. Later they would call it the Blue Screen of Death. Everything frozen and no choice but to power cycle. Sometimes in the DOS days if the fault involved display memory and you’d get to see strange artifacts sent to your CRT like the last confused impressions of a dying man. You turn it off and back on again. You wait through the interminable boot cycle, debug info scrolling past, incomprehensible. You sit through a disk integrity check. Minutes later it’s finally ready to respond to user input again and you try to remember what you were doing. This is what has been happening to me.

I guess you would call it a panic attack. I don’t have any physical symptoms. I just suddenly lose the plot. I sit and stare. I stop buying groceries and I stop cleaning up the kitchen. Projects sit abandoned. Work suffers. Sometimes I drink more than I should. I eat whatever I can find in the house. Hastily scrambled eggs at 10pm. I go on walks, which seems to help. Brooding. Working it out all over again. Piecing back together my makeshift peace. The kids come, finally, and I rush around trying to put some kind of life together, for them. Usually by the time they leave I’m sorted out.

The trigger is different every time. I do my best to compartmentalize. I’m good at protecting myself. But things slip through. She wrote another song about me: crash. Why did I listen to it? Why do I still follow her on Instagram? Because she posts pictures of the kids I guess. She calls me to argue about something my parents said to the kids: crash. I wish we could do this through a lawyer. No, I don’t wish that. Nevermind. She calls me to rant about Donald Trump. God only knows why. Idgaf.

The other week I met my neighbor and he told me his daughter was going to get married at the cathedral, and they were going to host the reception in his backyard. He gave me fair warning. I told him congratulations. He said I hope you don’t mind the noise. I don’t, I said. It’s exciting to hear people having a party. The day came and I felt happy for them. But it went on and on. Calling it a trigger makes it sound like a hair trigger, which isn’t right. You might have an idea of tiptoeing around certain sensitive areas to avoid a meltdown, but that isn’t how it works for me. It’s more like radiation exposure. I can take quite a bit actually. I’m pretty strong. But at a certain point it reaches a critical mass and starts to generate its own energy. I melt down. After an hour of hearing my neighbors and their friends sing along to DJ-blasted squeaky clean versions of 2010s radio hits I can’t keep my mind from drifting over to the topic of our wedding, and the whole travesty of it, and how the choices we made hadn’t been me any more than they had been her—stupid things, like why didn’t we have a DJ?—and how I’ll never be that young again, not even close, and I wonder if I ever will have a proper wedding, like in the future, the forlorn hope of which is its own kind of poison because it lets all of the above sink in much deeper than it otherwise would.

I feel it when I see people kissing. That should be me, I think. It should have been me. I’ve never felt visceral envy like this before. Do I need to bring this up in confession? Or maybe it’s just sense-memory pulling me back into the Zone. It’s so strange. If I could kiss someone else it would fix me, I think. I understand now why people rebound. There is the desire to erase her, Eternal Sunshine style. If the memories are corrupted, why not record over them? If I kissed someone else, at least I would have that association, good or bad, to help dilute all the ones that involve her. This seems like it would work. For instance, going to the beach doesn’t make me think of her, even though we went to the beach together a bunch of times. Lots of negative things at the beach actually, but it’s not a trigger. I’ve had enough other experiences that it all kind of mixes together and becomes benign.

There are other problem areas. A big one is Japan.1 It became a special interest in our family because of her. We took the kids twice. Lots of memories. Tens of thousands of dollars. Fancy photo books. It’s a fascinating culture. There are a lot of things I love about it. But it feels inescapable that all Japanese things point back to her. How do I exorcise this? I spent years off and on trying to learn Japanese. I’ve been brooding for half a year about whether to throw it all away. I still do my SRS reviews now and again but I’m not keeping up. Some amount of knowledge will always stay with me—I know how the language basically works. I can read the scripts and recognize hundreds of Kanji. I’ve read a number of short stories. I could order at a restaurant. But it feels like a sunk cost. I’d have to redouble my efforts to actually become fluent, and I kind of don’t see what the point is. Maybe I’ll meet someone who shares this interest, I think, lamely. This is absurd. It all has to be resolved before I could even think about another relationship. Nothing can be about her.

I realized one day with clear-eyed certainty that I would call myself 俺 now. This feels significant but will make sense to no one. There’s no one to say it to. 誰もいない。

I imagine going back to Japan with someone else, anyone else. Maybe my siblings, maybe a friend. I think I know enough to be a useful guide. I have some experience. But the point of this for me would be the same: to reclaim independence, to dilute associations. The whole idea kind of falls apart, because if that’s why you’re doing it, you have to admit to yourself that you’re there because of her. The majority of people (I assume) try kissing at some point in their lives, but most of them don’t travel to Japan. I seem to be in a no-win scenario. Perhaps I could just forget that Japan ever existed. Is that possible? Do we have this technology? It’s all further complicated by the fact that the kids tie us together in a certain way inexorably, and they themselves love Japan. If I try to cut myself off from it wholesale, I inevitably cut myself off from some part of them. I would be ceding that ground to her. There’s no way to win.

One thing that was actually helpful was to realize that I enjoy the process of language learning itself. I like the feeling of comprehension, when the unmeaning symbols start to make sense for the first time. I learned a lot of techniques, and so forth. So after my Spain trip last year I started messing around with Spanish, and this has turned out to be very rewarding. It’s an easier language, of course, coming from English. It’s also more practical, and better aligned with interests that don’t intersect the forbidden zone (Catholicism, Europe, etc). After less than a year I can read Spanish more easily than Japanese, and I’m making some real progress on listening. This kind of pivot seems to allow me to extract something from the wasted years that feels like it’s really mine, not some leftover part of her.

Sometime last year in the pursuit of my Japanese studies I took the step of ordering a complete manga series through a proxy service from the Japanese version of Yahoo auctions. The books were very cheap this way but you pay a lot for shipping. I chose the cheapest option, which I believe meant that my package was tucked away on a literal container ship and floated over to me at the leisure of ocean currents. It took a number of months. By the time it arrived she was in the process of moving out. To this day I still haven’t looked at any of them. They’re sitting on a shelf in my bedroom gathering dust.

My house is full of artifacts like this. She hasn’t finished clearing all of her stuff out, for one thing. And there are various things she purchased that are mine now. Gifts and so forth. She used to buy me clothes. My share of the furniture. The house itself I don’t really associate with her. She never got very far with decorating it, and she decided she didn’t like the house pretty early on. I’m locked into an interest rate and can’t realistically move, so the fact that she hated the house is honestly a relief. The kids like their rooms. But some of the household things harken back to older times, and it’s better not to dwell on them. Mostly this is easy enough. We’re all just trying to survive—we don’t have time to brood over the kitchen utensils (this one was a wedding present, that we bought to host a certain party, etc, etc). Sometimes I’ll idly think about sorting through it all, only keeping the things that I chose to keep. But this would just be asking for another crash. I haven’t had the fortitude to try yet.

The episodes seem to be getting less frequent, and maybe a little less severe. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m in danger. I remember in February they were lasting for about a week, and at one point they were hitting me back-to-back, no space to breathe. The most recent one was just two days, and occurred two weeks ago. I don’t know if this is because I’m healing or just the ebb and flow of circumstance. Each incident is unique in some way. The photo library still feels treacherous. I can flip through it but I can’t stop and stare. On Sunday I’ll be 38. The forbidden zone accounts for roughly 42% of my life at this point. If I live to 80 it will shrink to 20%. It’s not as bad as it could be. I look back at pictures from when I was 19 or 20 with a new kind of fondness and appreciation. I used to cringe at this era, but now it is a wellspring of refreshment, a kind of backup self.2 I’m dual booting after the crash. I’m scanning corrupted sectors. I’m restoring critical files. Some things are lost but not all.