Put the problems back

The next three chapters are the method. This one is the chapter 1 exercise, made permanent, and it's the hardest of the three because it works against the fade.

One page per golden year. Take the years that glow, and give each one a page. At the top, what you remember. The beach, the flat, the people. Then a line, and under it the problems column. What was wrong that year. Aim for five. Rent, work, health, a relationship, a worry that took up evenings. You'll get two easily and the other three will need the steps below.

Go to the record. Diaries, if you kept them. Letters and emails and old messages. Photographs, and not the one on the fridge but the fifty on the hard drive around it, which have the bad haircut and the tired face and the flat that was smaller than you remember. Bank statements if you've got them, which tell you what you were worried about better than memory does. The record exists somewhere, and it wasn't made by the fade.

Ask someone who was there. A friend, a sibling, a parent. "What was going on for me that summer?" They'll remember things you've cut, because they didn't have your reasons for cutting them, and some of what they say will be uncomfortable, and that's the whole record arriving.

Write the problems as they were, not as they turned out. The job you hated turned out fine, because you left it. Write the hating, not the leaving. The problems column is what the year felt like to live in, and living in it, you didn't know how it would end.

Don't take the good out. This isn't a demolition. The beach stays. The point is a page with the beach at the top and the rent underneath, so that when the golden version makes its case, the page is there to answer it. The good old days had problems too. That's the title of the book and it's the whole of this chapter.

Do it once, then keep it. The pages go somewhere you can reach. When the sigh arrives and you can't remember what was wrong that year, which you won't be able to, because that's the fade, you go and look. The looking takes a minute and it's the correction.