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n | Nov 26 2002

I’m having trouble with the letter n. I noticed this yesterday while writing my return address on a bill. I get to the n in Brooklyn and feel uncertain. How does one make that shape? Does one begin at the bottom-left or the top-left? Or where do I begin, since I must have a particular way of doing it, having done it for over thirty years.

This has been going on for some time now; months, I believe. I notice it whenever I write my return address, whenever I get to that n in Brooklyn. I usually end up writing a scaled-down capital n, which isn’t at all how I normally write a lowercase n. I know this because it doesn’t feel right. All the rest of the letters feel right.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I’m having a problem. Previously I’d feel awkward for a moment, write the n as best I could, and promptly forget about it. This time, though, I connected the experience to those earlier experiences.

It was unnerving. How does one forget how to do something one has done ten thousand times? It wasn’t as though I was afflicted by self-consciousness, given that the problem didn’t register until yesterday. Instead I’ve somehow lost or misplaced the information.

One imagines (being the imaginative type) that this is merely the beginning, that I will lose the letters one by one until the act of writing my own name becomes a horrific struggle, a struggle made even more horrific by my memory of a time when nothing seemed easier or more natural.

The final loss, then, or the final loss that matters, will be the loss of all these losses, the loss of my knowledge of them. I will forget what I’ve forgotten.

It will be like the beginning again, except it will be the end. The end is just like the beginning, except it’s the end.