Or, Cow Eyes, Every Time
There is a specific kind of blackout that has nothing to do with forgetting a word. You are mid-sentence, fully engaged, saying something you actually care about, and then something else, anything, a noise, a colour, a completely unrelated thought wandering past uninvited, catches your attention, and it’s gone. Not the word. The whole sentence. The topic. The conversation itself, evaporated, replaced by a look I can only describe as cow-like, eyes wide, entirely blank, giving absolutely nothing away because there’s genuinely nothing left in there to give.
The other person usually tries to help, offering a word, a gesture, a hopeful “you were saying something about…” that trails off because they’ve lost it too, somewhere in the process of watching you lose it. Nobody wins in this exchange. You both just sit there, two grown adults, entirely defeated by a sentence that seemed so promising thirty seconds earlier.
It happens walking into rooms too. You cross the threshold with total purpose and total certainty about why you’re there, and by the time you’re standing in the middle of it, the reason has simply left without you, no note, no explanation. You open a cupboard, or a drawer, and stand there exactly like that meme of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, arms half raised, spinning slowly, looking for an answer that isn’t going to arrive from staring harder. Sometimes you close the cupboard and open it again immediately, as if the second look will somehow be more honest than the first. It never is.
It happens at work too, which is the part nobody warns you about. You’ll be deep in successful multitasking, three things spinning at once, genuinely on top of it, emails and a spreadsheet and a half-written message all live at the same time, and then, mid-blink, the whole operation quietly shuts down. You’re left staring at a screen with several tasks open, fully capable of doing any one of them, and completely unable to choose which one deserves to happen first. Not overwhelmed. Not stuck. Just, briefly, entirely offline, waiting for the system to reboot on its own schedule rather than yours.
I used to think this was a concentration problem. I’ve since decided it’s just a brain that runs slightly too many tabs to file them all properly, and every so often it closes one it shouldn’t have, without asking, without even the courtesy of a warning. It always comes back eventually. Usually after you’ve stopped looking for it, which feels like the least helpful timing possible, and also, somehow, exactly on brand.
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