Memory Loss

You forget. Names, appointments, conversations that took place only yesterday. Sometimes you lose the thread mid-sentence, and for a moment everything stands still — as though someone had erased the tape on which your life is being recorded. It feels like a fog settling over your daily life. What was just within reach dissolves before you can hold it.

Medicine examines memory loss as a neurological phenomenon — changes in the hippocampus, disrupted neurotransmitters, insufficient blood flow to certain brain areas. All of that is real and deserves attention. But the psychosomatic perspective poses an uncomfortable additional question: what if your forgetting is not a defect — but a decision? Not a conscious one. But one made deep within you. A decision to withdraw from the here and now. Piece by piece. Memory by memory.