I like keeping lists. I write lists of everything I think about, in obedience to the constant niggling feeling that I have forgotten something. I live in fear of the fact that the gleaming, forged edges of my memories are slowly losing their shape and that I will never be able to cut through to the heart of my life as cleanly as before, or, heaven forbid, I forget that I have math homework due tomorrow. I feel constantly twisted and pulled, always living in now and never having any time for later, until I become a shapeless experiment hurtling through the wind tunnel trying desperately to figure out what the scientists goggling through the side window want me to do. I keep my lists in the hope that at least the scientists will have some data to define me and will not mark me down as a failure.
The most important list is on my computer. In it, I write down the memories I can remember that evoke a smile, a frown, or a thought.

As I look through it now, I find that I have forgotten something, as I often do.

Over the summer a few years ago, I, along with my friend, were asked to be teacher’s assistants at my old middle school for summer remedial courses. We were assigned to a math teacher whose name I cannot remember. The desks were arranged not in rows but in groups, with each student facing each other in islands while separated by a small gulf through which a teacher or a bumbling but helpful teenager could walk through. I felt as if I were a very large, fat, advertising blimp that is never really welcome but you have to acknowledge with at least a glance upwards. I do not remember making a connection with a single student as we graded papers, ran math games, or walked around answering questions.

At the end of the summer school, when all of the students had left and only the student aides were in the cafeteria, the teacher walked in and asked us to sit down. She told us that she had graded the final exams, and that she had never seen such amazing gains for a summer class in her long career of teaching. She told us to remember this always. Then she got up and left.

This was the first time that I had ever received any news that what I did had an impact on someone else. For once, I had helped create a later.
I add this to the list.
The scientists ask of how I was created or what I was based on, and I cannot answer completely. I am in constant pursuit of my blueprints, in a race against time to touch my fingertips to my pulse and construct the idea of myself.
But when I lose sight when I wander the endless desert of now, at least I will have a few signposts to guide me.