It has been hot here the last few days, which is strange for this time of year- usually it rains in June. Maybe it’s this unexpected heat that has been making me feel so strange. This happens to me sometimes. I get this odd feeling in my head like there are a thousand flies caught inside a jar. If you touched a finger to the side of the jar you could feel how their restlessness makes the glass vibrate. My brain is buzzing, an incoherent hum so distracting that the other day I purchased a thin, palm-sized booklet to keep in my purse. On the cover I wrote, “Things to remember.”

Every day there are so many precious little moments, and I feel like I should- I must- remember them all. Days are strung together by the hundreds of pretty things that happen; small, inconsequential things that don’t matter to anyone else in the world but me. But to me, they matter so very much because it’s these moments upon which my life is built. If I lose one, if I forget and let go of the string, it feels like everything could unravel in an instant. They’re nothing-things, but they are incredibly, incredibly important. Today it was the dimple in my client’s left cheek that turned his whole face lopsided every time I made him smile, and it was the damp skin on my friend Brian’s neck that pressed against my forehead when he hugged me goodbye. Yesterday it was a rumpled white t-shirt, a smilie-face balloon in a hospital room, and a stranger noticing my blue eyes.

The other day I had coffee with one of my high school teachers. We’ve kept in touch over the years and his wisdom is as important to me now as it was when I was fifteen. We were talking about my grandmother and he told me that he had read a book about exiled monks from Tibet. He said that the monks believe you can send messages to those who have died by burning a letter and letting the ashes carry your words to the person you love. Every time I think about this I cry, and every time I feel the tears on my cheek I remember how much I love and respect this man, and every time I remember him I realize how flat and sad my life would be if he never taught me that the only thing that matters in life is connecting with another human being. Things like this must be remembered, I must think about them to keep myself from losing direction. I remember hearing once that if you get caught underwater, it’s possible to panic so thoroughly that you end up swimming deeper and drowning yourself. You’re supposed to stop, breathe out, and watch which way the bubbles go. Follow the bubbles to the surface.

It’s hard to stop and think when the air is so hot and the flies are buzzing so loudly inside this jar. I jot down notes in my booklet and then I write about them here because I don’t trust myself to remember. And remembering is vital. These moments, these nothing-things, are the bubbles that show me which way to swim.