1

There is no linear way to narrate the year I don't remember. While I could tell the selection of memories I have had reconstructed for me, writing someone else's words for a memoir seems awfully close to plagiarism. The only way that I could even begin to tell this story was not to tell it at all.

Let me explain: I have been heavily influenced by Janet Malcolm's "Forty-One False Starts" this semester. When I first read the piece, it felt like talking to an old friend. There was something so comforting about her writing, as though it was as alive as her characters and the version of Manhattan she envisions. I should note that I sometimes feel as though I have whatever the opposite of ADHD would be because I can't focus on something if it doesn't move fast enough. If I try to write a story for too long, it unravels and I'm left with fragments connected by red string across a corkboard. If I tried to do that while telling the story of my year of madness, you could imagine where that would leave me (the answer to this, by the way, is the psych ward). Malcolm writes, as you probably inferred, forty-one different ways she would begin one story instead of telling the story itself. For someone with a brain like mine, Malcolm is a literary hero. In effect, her piece gave me the means of telling the tale of my anxiety, of my forgotten year, and, most absurdly, of Roy Cohn.

I still do not know how I will tell this story, but there are countless ways I can begin it.

2

There is an ache I share with Roy Cohn. However imaginary it may be, it is a fault line that connects me to him laced with emotions and earthquakes. Everything around him hums with a dull melancholy: Joseph McCarthy drinking himself to death, the self-loathing Dora Cohn enforced on her son, Roy's last boyfriend holding his hand as he took his last breath. Roy never felt anything for any of these things so I do on his behalf.

I always feel everything so much. It's why I can't sleep at night, why I feel burdensome to everyone, and why it seems as though my chest contains a collapsing star every once in a while. Maybe it's my emotional capacity that has allowed me to read between the lines of his life or maybe I'm just projecting, but I see that melancholy seeping out of Roy and spilling all over the narrative arc of his life.

3

As I walked down Eagle Row, I couldn't help but wonder what anyone would think if they saw me right now: eye makeup coating my face, hair matted down to my forehead and neck, and the skin on my arms burning a furious shade of red from exposure to the November air. But most noticeably, I was gasping, jilted and broken breaths barely escaping from my lungs.

It's a memory I only recently uncovered through writing about a low point in my life. The sensation of it had flooded back to me, sweeping me up and taking me out to sea. I remember now trudging on, gripping myself closer, as the rain poured down. I remember now stripping as I made my way up the stairs of my sorority house. I remember now that I threw my body on the floor of the shower, still in my underwear and socks, and that I gave into the feeling.

I came to ten minutes later, soaked to the bone and quite literally drowning. It escaped me then as I lay tightly wound up in a ball of screaming skin that I had had a really good day. I had played with puppies at an event, I met up with an old friend at my favorite restaurant, and I had gone on a date with the boy who made my heart soar. And now here I was: decrepit and alone. I cleaned myself off and got out of the shower. In the mirror above the sink, there was a girl with bloodshot eyes glaring back at me, raised claw marks coating her neck and chest. She was the girl I had tried to shake off at the party who insisted on clinging to me. I couldn't escape her.

Whenever I had had these episodes before, I was left empty afterward, deprived of all sensation as though my soul had frostbite. But as I slid into bed that night, the itching feeling at the back of my brain returned. My throat began to close, my lungs to shrink. I heard the door open and I willed myself to disappear. I watched my roommate Bria appear in the doorway, the concern on her face hurting me more than the throbbing in my head. She rushed over, reeking from her night out. I tried to scream but my voice became a vacuum.

Bria kept murmuring, "I'm here. It's okay, I'm here." I could only choke up a few words before the world went dark again.

"Imsorryimsorryimsorry."

4

Living with Roy Cohn is like living with a ghost. He is always there, and he is not. He often feels sentient to me, as though he is dictating the stories I tell from just over my shoulder until I turn around and find myself all alone. When I met Roy two years ago, it was like encountering a stranger in a dream only to see them again in the waking hours; it was disorienting and familiar all at once.

5

I grew up swimming in the Nantucket Sound where the waves were never more than a few inches tall, even at high tide. I remember the first time my family ever drove out to Nauset Beach so that we could swim in the Atlantic Ocean. We waded out at low tide and the waves were already bigger than they had ever been at our quaint Pleasant Road Beach. The water was so cold it burned our skin. I grew comfortable with the spreading numbness but my brother and sister could not. Soon, it was just my dad and me in waters up to my chest. I may as well have been alone though as I drifted through the ocean and my thoughts. Then, with no warning, the tides began to shift. I remember the first wave with perfect clarity: I turned around, so cinematically, as this behemoth swell surged towards me, catching me off-guard. I was under before I had a chance to suck in a breath. My feet were knocked to Europe by the undertow as my head was thrown back to shore. I struggled —the one thing you're never to do in a riptide— as time slowed down and the water held me closer. My head broke through first and I gasped for air. I heard my dad calling my name but the sound was distorted as if I was still underwater. I tried to find my voice to call back to him but before I could open my mouth, the second wave struck and I began drowning again.

This is what my anxiety feels like.

6

Where I should have memories from my sophomore year, I just have empty space. Or, more accurately, I have a solar system: I have memories strewn like planets throughout the expanse of the year. Some of them are bigger than others and some are not so much memories as they are shards of information that come flying through my mind like asteroids. It helps to drive past places I used to know. On my way to a Sunday brunch recently, I passed two stores in a relatively nondescript strip mall. Seeing it though was like peeling back a fresh scab and, like blood to the edges of a re-exposed wound, a memory flooded to the surface of my thoughts: I had walked between these stores with my phone turned off while waiting for my aunt to finish her manicure at some point during the weekend I had called and begged her to let me stay at her apartment. While I can now see and describe this scene with impeccable clarity, I have no recollection of what prompted me to call her in such dire straits or what we did for the rest of the weekend. As it is, my memory from that time in my life has become a liminal space, one I can recognize but never return to.

7

For the past two years, I have been trying to tell Roy Cohn's story. In doing so, I realized that maybe I have one worth sharing, too. At first, I approached my sophomore year from the fatalistic angle everyone takes when writing about Roy (evil, Satan incarnate, death, destruction). But the more time I spent with him, the more I realized my story was not one of the friends who abandoned me or the nights I spent isolated inside my head. It was not about the days I didn't recognize my reflection or the days I wish I remembered. My story with Roy is about how I got better; about how I looked at myself in the mirror one day and instead of shrugging it off, I saw that something had to change; about how I began opening my head to those I loved and was shown love right back; about how I began to grow.

Roy's story didn't have a happy ending and I honestly do not know if mine will either. I gave a speech on Preference Night for my sorority during my sophomore year and in hindsight, it was one of the dumbest things I have ever done. I was preaching about how validated my chapter had made me at a time when I was losing my mind. I stood at the front of the room, telling everyone I had recovered when the real disease was only just beginning to spread. So maybe I'm doomed for far worse than what I've already survived; who knows? Maybe I'm jinxing it by writing this down.

What I do know is that for right now, I'm okay. I'm not healed or cured or saved. I flinch instinctively whenever I see people I used to know, like a boy I went on a date with once who made my heart soar, and I have to live with a void inside my head that hurts if I peer too deeply into its depths. But I was drowning before and now I have both feet planted on the shore. It's hard to ask the Patron Saint Roy M. Cohn for anything more than that.

Plus, this isn't the end of my story. It's just another beginning.