Hey, it's Slowdown Producer Micah.

For today's guest episode, we welcome into the host chair, Poet and Editor Leslie Signs.

Don't worry, Major will be back in your feeds on July 1st. I'm Leslie Signs, and this is the slowdown.

I'm Leslie Signs,

and this is the slowdown.

Today is my 32nd birthday and I vowed to add Ginko Bilova to the

laundry list of supplements I take each day to improve my quality of life or placebo effect my way into believing the

quality of my life has improved. I never had an impressive long-term memory to begin with, but some unfortunate combination of chronic stress, clinical depression, and dissociative amnesia seems to have eroded my ability to recall large swaths of memories formed after age

17. This is proven rather debilitating in social situations. I've lost count of the number of times those close to me

ask if I remember the time we did X, with X standing in for a formative memory they assume we share.

Given their description of the event,

I'm usually in agreement that I should remember it,

even though I don't.

It can feel like a twisted version of Lucille Clifton's iconic poem,

Why People Be Man at Me Sometimes, which reads, in its entirety,

They ask me to remember, but they want me to remember their memories, and I keep

on remembering mine. There is one strange caveat, however.

Though I might have extreme difficulty remembering what I said or did on a particular evening,

I always remember what I wore, and, for the most part, what everyone else

wore.

I've given this some thought, and I want to blame the early to mid 2000s, the era of the going out top.

This special occasion number dominated our closets, tube tops, pepland tops and halter tops decorated with rhinestones, sequins, or lace.

...