Dream State

work, obsession, and making memories

at Russ’ flower show in Ladbroke Hall with Abigail and Penelope

May started with forgetting.

I was trying to recall a conversation I’d had with my anthropologist friend. Something about identity, something that had wound its way into a Glia talk I’ve been sketching called “The Timeless Way of Building,” echoing a few concepts I’ve been exploring around memory. I ransacked my brain yet still couldn’t get there. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when one fails to remember the thoughts one didn’t finish. It’s become a toxic indulgence on frazzled days to leave my thoughts unfinished. I now spiral in the gap.

*

I was sitting in paralysis all day, unable to finish one single task (to be fair, it was a Sunday). And I was wasting time, or what felt like wasting time, because I was busy thinking about love.

Obsessing, really. Replaying funny things he’d said. Laughing out loud walking down the street at something silly and random. Under truth serum one night, he told me I looked pretty and that he missed me. Miss you. It’s that simple, and I could not stop thinking about that text.

I woke up at 6 one morning, maybe too excited to see him. I wanted to line my lips with a mauve pencil and slip on heels. I wanted to look girly and cute. This is strange to admit, wanting to be wanted. But it felt honest, and honesty is what I’m working with here.

My thinking brain tells me to stop bending over backwards. My feeling brain wants to hear his voice and what’s on his mind. My animal brain just wants.

*

Co-working with my friend RL at Mei Leaf one Saturday, they asked me what my kill switch is for dating, and if I don’t have one, to set it up now.

I told them it’s when I feel disrespected. And then, as I said it, I remembered a moment from my last relationship: the night we got back from a long hike, tipsy off seven shared cocktails, running to McDonald’s. And then, on the way home, he said a few words lightheartedly aggressive. I remembered feeling a jerk in my heart, because even drunk, my subconscious knew that’s not how I’d like to be treated.

People rarely change in the safety of a relationship, and they are who they are when we first meet them.

RL sees people for what they deserve, which is a layer above what they are. It asks: what can I and this world be to you, what can we be to each other? That takes more altruism than most people are capable of. I find them wise in a way that books and thoughts just couldn’t get you to.

*

Selin called one afternoon to tell me she’d gotten into the medical school branch that won’t require her to move. She’s excited to finally put down roots. I haven’t been able to in years, she said.

And I thought of Summer 2022. How infinite life seemed when we graduated. That particular joy and the feeling that we would all become the people we’d dreamt of becoming, pressing our special footprints onto this world. Unfazed by the hardest things. I blinked and it’s been four years.

I an happy to say that between all the courage and the loss, I still believe anything and everything is possible.

*

On our campervan trip, I walked with Chris alongside a brook in Bourton-on-the-Water. At some point he slowed down and said, Look at the water. Notice the pace it’s moving at.

He picked up a leaf from the ground. Let’s do an experiment. He dropped it in the water, and we began walking at the pace it floated. It almost exactly matched our pace, just slightly slower, but I could suddenly feel every step.

The whole month I’ve been slingshotting myself at a pace way too fast to take in what’s happening, sprinting past the leaf, looking back and wondering where I went.

There’s something in The Art of Noticing, the book Stephen shared, that I think is related: how adult perception gets weighted down by priorities and futures and worries, while children still see everything with equal amounts of attention. Penelope, who is ten, opened Glia and used it to document things she overheard on the street, her day touring London, cool photos. She explores every nook of an app to map out how everything comes together. She makes her own magical moments rather than waiting for them.

*

May brought a lot of shedding: relational, structural. A collaboration had run its course. I could empathize with why someone is the way they are, but that doesn’t oblige me to accept their behavior. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude seeing the dedication and labor of love he has poured into Glia, yet when I dreaded the basic act of communication, I knew. In any kind of partnership, that’s the thing you can’t reason your way around.

I think about this with romantic relationships and I think about it with collaborators: you know when it’s not on a soul mate level. A good partnership, any good partnership, asks for both respect and passion. Respect alone is aloofness. Passion alone is just chaos. With a cofounder, the stakes are as high as they get. We are going to battle together. We have to be able to talk to weather the hardest moments.

My entire career exists in the search space, where my antenna is humming but the path isn’t obvious yet. The thing about search space is that, uncertainty is also where surfaces things that really matter.

*

On the day my friends left for New York, Tanja hugged me close at the door and said: We can’t choose the family we’re born into, but we get to build our own with people we love in this life, and you are definitely someone we want as part of us. There were tears in her eyes. I cried too.

After they left, my flat was still warm from their presence. I looked up and saw the Glia vision board. I looked left and saw Matt’s clock, the one that reminds me to build for the evergreen, for things that are alive and will always matter.

Barry had sent flowers to congratulate Glia being on the App Store. Three new peony blooms by the kitchen window, so full of life. I put down my morning tea to caress the petals, breathless. How elegant and intricate is their shape. There’s time for rejoicing surrounded by people we love and there’s time for endless toil. It could always be worse, and it will always get better. All of this is fleeting, remember.

*

There’s memory in service of machines: context windows, retrieval, productivity. I am interested in machine memory in service of people. Self-understanding comes down to remembering. It’s how we become legible to ourselves over time. How we understand that the difficult relationship, the career doubt, the month that floored us are not isolated, merely parts of a longer story. And that longer story, when we can actually see it, tells us something true about who we are, what we want, and why we live.

At Glia, we call this the DNA layer of memory. The things that are so consistently you, across time and context, that they function almost like a signature. When you’re sad, you need certain things. When you’re making a decision, you come back to the same questions. “Kinda like how people have kids when the economy is good.”

*

On an open field, buttercups are blooming like tiny suns. Do you know that if you smelled one closely enough, your nose gets tinted yellow?

Erica