THE GUIDE is a written documentation of my personal experiences and the subsequent research that led to the development of Tangent World Breach Theory. It endeavors to use history and science to explain loss, and describes how I and some of the people I know have coped with the inevitabilities of our existence. This excerpt is from an early chapter. 

I was born in 1982, same as EPCOT, CD players, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It was also the same year that seven people were killed when a disgruntled Tylenol employee laced pills with potassium cyanide. Seven people were present, acutely aware of their aliveness due to their respective headaches or back pains, and then…gone.

My arrival and the subsequent years were prodigiously documented by my mother’s 35mm camera and the countless rolls of color film she had developed at a local photo shop. It seems so quaint now to think back on the anticipation of seeing, for the first time, the images she had captured weeks prior. I notoriously made faces the moment the shutter snapped, ruining my share of carefully orchestrated family photos. But the thrill of the unknown excited me, and eventually prompted me to pick up her camera as my own. My most prolific era as an amateur photographer, however, coincided with a deep need for personal documentation.

I had grown acutely aware of the precarious nature of each passing moment, of the mortality of those I loved, of my own ability to remember the events of my life. Photography I thought, provided an irrefutable witness to that which I feared I would forget.

Despite a life that now spans nearly forty years, evidence has often been a challenge to locate. Many of those who were witness to significant events have died, and photos or documents that a relative swears they had stashed in some unmarked box seem to have dematerialized. But I was relentless in my search. Perhaps our memories are fallible, our minds imperfect, but in collecting oral histories I was able to draw connections. (discuss relatives I interviewed) Frequently our tendency is to gloss over moments of our lives that we might in any way categorize as mundane and instead tune our focus towards the image we would prefer to cast of the world. Knowing this, I asked questions about small things in addition to the obviously impactful. Seemingly innocuous patterns or candid photos suddenly unearthed from the archives bore great significance to my inquiry.

What I discovered was that we have become desensitized to multiplying gaps in our reality. People are accustomed to these glitches in our world, to sudden and unexplainable omissions and alterations, to unanticipated additions and discoveries. Evolution and survival depends on our ability to adapt, and so perhaps it is no big surprise that we often elect to ignore that which we do not understand. Denial is an effective coping mechanism.

In proportion to my size, the things that were lost when I was small were as well: paratroopers dropped from a second story balcony, costume jewelry, hot wheels cars… At 16, however, I became aware of the first significant gap in my world. A heartbeat was lost, skipped over, forgotten, and my body rushed to fill the vacancy. Frantically galloping over the tiny hole in space and time until my lungs gasped for their next breath. It was a simple glitch, an absent-minded soft gaze into the refrigerator in search of an answer, and I dismissed it. But the gap returned. In the years to follow it became a space that would open up occasionally, then sometimes, then often, until it became a familiar landmark in my world, one by which I could offer directions: “Go out past the sign of expectation, take a left, and you’ll know it by what you don’t see. Can’t miss it.”