October 6th 2023 4:36pm-- Personal Brain Storming

I’m trying to figure out the best way to outline the narrative here. Some ideas I want to touch on: identity (duh), trust, our place in the world, regret, grief. I mean, what I’m interested in, fundamentally, is how that differing memory between my dad and I would exist if blown up into a whole story. Part of what all of this is me exploring my own past, my own reconciliation with how I got here, the people I’ve let go of, and the ones I've held on to for dear life. What drew me to Payton, and why am I friends with him now, still, after all this time? And Spencer! Never in my life would I just invite a stranger over on “school night” like that, but I did, and here we are all these years later. If thrown into a different universe, would I try to look for him again? Would I look for Sarah? Would those versions of them like this version of me? What do we do with the people we have crushes on, romantic and unromantic? Who are the people we see on the subway and cock our heads to one side and think, huh, I think I could like you.

Unrelated aside: I feel like in another life, I was close to my grandpa. I feel like I have this kinship with him that was fostered somewhere other than here because how could it have here? He was absent from his body. I wonder where he went. Maybe Alzheimer's is just time travel with consequences. The more you keep going back, the farther you get away from now.

The idea for the story was to start the first half with The Record. Everything is from the perspective of Ruth, who knows nothing about herself or her circumstances and then tries to build herself back. What does this look like without a memory? What if we forget ourselves and then don’t like who we remember? And what of the people around us who knew us before and now after? How does it feel to learn about yourself from other people? And how do YOU feel when you end up disappointing them or perceiving a certain emotion in them (that may or may not be true)? It’s really this journey of self-discovery that I think is sort of a metaphor (not really a metaphor but rather a grafting on) of how I felt and how I know other people have felt coming out of the pandemic. What was it like before? Who were we before? Will we get back there? Then there’s this fog of an in-between time that feels like it’s still happening and still not happening. Over and not over. What we know for sure is that everything has changed irreparably, and we’re just trying to figure out who we are now and where we go from here. It’s also a growing-up story, but in that adult way you grow up. There’s this quick burst of change that happens when you’re in high school and then college and then out of college. Those transitions are so fast you forget they’re happening. But then there’s the slow change of adulthood. People get married, have kids, move away, start drinking more or stop. Not only is it harder to make friends, but it can be harder to find things to talk about with the ones you have once you’ve really solidified yourself. How can a story examine that from a new perspective?

So The Record: It would be a collection of “objective” and subjective material– part-diary entry, part-found documents–that would outline her experience being found, learning about how she was lost, reuniting with family, and going on this journey from her singular perspective with this fact-checking to back it up. The Record, then, is authoritative but also reflective and introspective. As much as she tries to deal with facts, she is also illustrating the meandering way that we’re all trying to find the pieces of ourselves we dropped while marching through quarantine. The twist– or vaguely sci-fi element– is that this journey of self-discovery is happening while she is dealing with the fact that the parts of her memory are at odds with the facts or reality of things. Some things she knows end up being true, but she shouldn’t know them. Other things are completely false though she feels like they are true with great certainty. And then other things line up, so she doesn’t know where reality begins and where it ends. (An aside– I imagine this is the way people who are grappling with conspiracy/QAnon must feel in part as well). Then there’s a break. Something happens, and she firmly lands on one side or the other. In my head, it ends up being the tread of her shoes. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at someone’s shoe stand, but you can see how all their shoes wear away in the same way because of their gait. And she sees that the boots that she was found in, although they could have never been hers, are worn in the same way that her other shoes are, but not as if she had worn them for 20 days. As if she had worn them for years. Then she thinks about her tattoo and learns about how it appears to be very old as well. She’s missing a minuscule scar that she sees in an errant photo but can’t see on her body. And it confirms to her what she’s felt all along– she is not Frances Ruth Reynolds. Not the Frances Ruth Reynolds from wherever she is anyway.

Perhaps she’s committed to a psych ward. Perhaps she gives up entirely and just tries to assimilate the best she can. Maybe she just enters this deep depression. That’s the second part.

In the beginning of the first part of The Record I’ve written thus far, there’s this dream sequence where she’s on a submarine. The middle part would be a hazy, part dream sequence part made up of a non-fiction-esque essay that would be akin to the middle part of To the Lighthouse.

Then there’s the third part, which I’m kind of just referring to as The Archive. It’s an Archive because it’s a place that gathers a lot of personal records and sort of displays them in this one picture. There you get the story of what happens after the end of the first part and also build on it, providing flashbacks and alternative perspectives to the events that Ruth recorded.

Actually scratch that, it’s not so much an archive. I’ll call part three Mosaic. It's the part where all the pieces come together.

No, here it is:

Part One: Record
Part Two: Collate
Part Three: Reckon

I don’t know if that works but it’s going to be the frame I use for now. I think.