Reverse amnesia, where instead of a character forgetting several years, they remember several years into the future.

This is a note that I have from a while ago, from January 2020, just as Covid19 began its crawl on Australia. Before beginning its run.

Despite knowing how it is, it took a long time to really convince myself that most writing is the same cake but just slightly different ingredients, it’s how you use those ingredients that makes a work unique. So I started thinking of ways I could change the ingredients in new and interesting ways.

I think someone might just go mad if they had reverse amnesia, and it’s borderline “returned to the past via mind”. But it’s something that I sonetimes think about when I get strong deja vu at a place I haven’t been. There’s a strong familiarity but a sense that I’m in the wrong time, that what I’m feeling is from before. But this also happens at places I am familiar with. “I’m meant to be somewhere else” is the feeling I always get. Here, but someplace else. As if someone is waiting for me in another time or another universe. It’s like I suddenly remember them and get the urge to return, but of course I don’t. It’s such a curious feeling that has the strength to disorient me and make me wonder where I’m meant to be, and who is always speaking on the wind to remind me they’re there? That I know them but have forgotten who they are. That I feel secure in their hold, as if I knew it for decades, centuries ago. Like some great old fable of a previous life I’ve put to rest.

But that could just be the years of reading and writing fiction cuddling my brain and senses.