The world is possessed with a terrible curse: except for me, everyone lives through history backwards.

When I was a kid, my dad took my younger sister and I to the beach as a gift for my mother’s birthday: he doesn’t like the beach, he doesn’t like the heat, he doesn’t like the sand; he took us, then, only because he loved her.<br><br>He bought my sister a big new sandcastle toy set with all sorts of shapes and sizes; she used it to dig tunnels and castles and all sorts of things. He bought me a frisbee; I threw it, and it sailed down the beach all the way through the sandcastles and tunnels of a young boy. All sunburnt, he wept. My dad went up to him and asked what had happened, but the boy simply sobbed too hard to answer.<br><br>*&#x200B;*<br><br>I think I must have been 8 then, and my sister 5. I remember it clearly only because of the look on the little boy’s face. I didn’t realize what was happening, of course, because I was too young to understand it, but now I’ve come to realize that frisbees float backwards through the air and sandcastles are dug back out of holes in reverse. I can imagine that little boy working for hours on his creation only to have it destroyed in a second. The memory brings tears to my eyes.<br><br>When I was 12, my grandfather died. I didn’t know him well, and the funeral was the first time I had seen him in years; I remember feeling sad that I would never know him the way a grandchild should know a grandfather, as my father knew him.<br><br>Years later, when my dad fell gravely ill with diabetes, I remember begging him not to die. I had always been terrified of death and now here it was before me, taking the best man I had ever known. My best hope was that his death would be painless and quick; it was neither. In the end, I sang him a song that he used to sing to me, and he died as I sang about how the world was possessed with a terrible curse: that except for me, everyone lived through history backwards. I sang about how everyone is born with all of the experiences and memories of a full life and how they shed them, bit by bit, as they move backwards in time towards birth. I sang about how we all go through life blind to everyone else. I sang about how one day I would forget him too, but that I would forget him slowly, and that would be its own torture. As I sang my final verse, he worked his lips and struggled to speak, but it was too late. He was gone.<br><br>A few days later, it came to me as a flash of insight, and I knew that it was true: every bit of it. Just about everyone else on earth lives life backwards.<br><br>I realized that a cut healed itself overnight. I realized that plants shrunk back into the earth and were pulled back into seeds. I realized that the world was possessed of a terrible curse, and I was the only exception.<br><br>It was only a few years later, when I was in college, that I met my wife. She was so beautiful that I could hardly speak; she was so kind that I couldn’t help but love her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but that meant watching her grow younger and younger until one day she would disappear. Still, I could not bear to be without her; I proposed, and we married. She grew younger and younger, born more and more with the experiences and memories of a full life, drawing further and further away from me as the days went by. She talked about having children one day, about how she wanted to bear me sons and marry them off and forget them before they even knew her. I couldn’t let it happen, of course, but I knew that I was powerless to do anything about it. I knew that I would love her for the rest of my life and that no matter how long it was, it would be too short. I knew that in the end, she would be taken from me, and I would never see her again.<br><br>In the end, it was not death that took her from me. It was something far worse. She grew younger and younger, and the experiences and memories of a full life accumulated. She talked less and less about the things we had done together and more and more about the things she would one day do, things she had done years ago and would do again. She stopped recognizing me one day, then stopped knowing she was married. After years of happy marriage, she became a child, and she forgot me entirely. I took her back to her parents about a year after our wedding, when she was still recognizable as an adult but only just. I think she remembered me as a friend. Her parents were glad to see her; they had forgotten about her already. I asked them to take care of her, and they promised they would. I will never see her again, but almost four decades on I still think about her. She would be in her 80s now. Perhaps she has grandchildren that she will soon forget, as I have forgotten my own father and will one day forget her. One day, I will not even remember that I am alone, and that will be its own torture. I will go through life blind to everyone else, and I will never understand them.<br><br>The world is possessed with a terrible curse, and every day I find it more and more unbearable: everyone lives life backwards, and I can see it.