It’s 1999. You’re the writer of this article, and you’re fully unaware of the purge your brain is undertaking. It doesn’t want to hold onto anything, and thinks it’s going to protect the future you. So it’s memory after memory in the burn pile reduced to ash and dust.

In 2020, this will be why you’ll struggle to remember. Things won’t be going so well. You’ll be in quarantine with your husband as death and disease are on every channel, every site, every group chat and comments section.

You’ll start feeling doom. You’ll start to think about the possibility of this being the end. You’re not sick, but a lot of people are. It might just not be your turn yet. The odds might not be high but Russian Roulette is Russian Roulette. Someone loses.

They’ll have shut down the theme parks only weeks before opening day, and it will already have been a month and more since that with no change in sight.

You’ll have Six Flags and Cedar Fair memberships, and of all the things you might worry about, you’ll somehow find time to concern yourself that you’ll never ride a roller coaster again. It’ll have been up to then an abstract concept- some day I will die and there will be a roller coaster which was my last. What will that be? Is it even built yet?

It won’t be as abstract so suddenly. Just three months prior, in January, you and your husband will have flown to California for one of the first cruises of the Carnival Panorama. You’ll have given yourself an extra day in Long Beach to enjoy Knott’s Berry Farm. You’ll have gotten all the credits, and nothing will have disappointed. You’ll even have the GhostRider on-ride photo.

But you won’t remember what you rode last.

You’ll start wondering if this is how it ends, and you’ll feel compelled but falter in putting it all back together from the start. You’ll start thinking about the past. You’ll start trying to remember.

You’ll think an awful lot about 1999, and some of it will come to you. You’ll think bit about 1997, and some of that will come back, too. But you’ll try and hardly recall a thing from 1998. In 2020, you’ll remember 1998 and be on a Merry Mixer at the 4H Fair. You’ll resuscitate 1998 from 2020 and be in a blank, wordless phone call with the theme to Clarissa Explains it All in the background. You’ll be coming home from a sleepover at some kid’s house and Dad needs to talk to you. You’ll be at Kishacoquillas Park in your little league uniform that you changed into in the car, wishing you were somewhere else. And you’ll be ashamed how little else you’ll find. It’s all ash and dust.

You’ll find an excuse to write about the time, about things you cared about, and you’ll do it in the second person point of view you learned from your Goosebumps Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Most of what will come back are snippets of moments, expressions and feelings. Some of them will be amalgamations of things you’d done hundreds of times, some will be moments so singular yet banal it’s frightening how seared in they are, as if your soul knew the import better than your conscious self. Your Mom driving you to preschool along Belleville’s backcountry roads and the funny feeling in your stomach when she goes over the tight hills just a bit too fast. Getting on the bus in kindergarten for a field trip to Happy Valley Friendly Farm and sitting next to a shy kid from the afternoon class you’d never met and being so impressed he already had a moustache. The same table at McDonald’s you’d sit at every Saturday with your Dad and Pap before grocery shopping. Your Mom putting a canister in the bank’s air tube system as you ask if your best friend can sleep over tonight. Watching coaster shows on cable television with your brother in the living room. (Not the mean older one, the younger one that even in 2020 people will mistake as your twin.) You’ll remember how the CRTs would crackle with static and hum when turned on, how the light they shined looked warm, was warm, like incandescent bulbs. You’ll remember how the blank black glass would get so cold once it was off. Warm to cold. Ash to dust. You remember touching cold makeup.

The images will be so disjointed, and all the moe overwhelming for it.

You’ll try to remember and think Raging Wolf Bobs was your first big boy coaster, but there’ll only be so many things you really remember from that whole trip: That the Corkscrew was your first inversion, not the Double Loop. A souvenir message-in-a-bottle from Sea World Ohio you intended to give to your best friend when you got home. Agonizing over the perfect thing to shout as you went over the first big drop of your coaster life.

It will be 2020 and you won’t remember the ride, but you’ll vividly remember you screamed “I’m going to diiiiiie!” and God only knows what inspired you.

But it’s not 2020 and you’re not trying to remember Belleville’s roads, your best friend’s moustache, or watching TV with your younger brother. Not yet.

It’s 1999, you’re 11 years old, and you are watching TV with your younger brother. It’s ESPN, and Penn State is one of the hottest teams in the country. Your brother loves LaVar Arrington, and says that whoever drafts him, that’s going to be his NFL team from now on. You’re not as interested. You open the channel guide to see if Discovery or Travel Channel are showing another coaster show- and they are!

You’ve only ever been to three amusement parks: Bland’s Park, Geauga Lake, and Hersheypark. In that order. Not a lot, but enough to know that you love roller coasters. You’re barely tall enough to ride but you’ve never seen one you didn’t want to immediately jump on.

Sucks how your Dad hates them. And your Mom gets anxious in crowds. They don’t even want to walk you the two blocks down to the 4H Fair when it sets up each summer, so they send you and your brother, or your best friend when he would have slept over, on your own with $20 to ride the Salt and Pepper Shaker and Merry Mixer all night and come home smelling like cigarettes and manure.

(Your best friend especially liked to ride with you. His parents hadn’t let him ride the exciting rides. He had only got to do that with you. You are not yet thinking too much about that. So it goes.)

You gawk at the incredible coasters on the TV, amazed at every ride. They all seem bigger and faster and more extreme than each other, an impossible Escher landscape of records. And every other one is at some Six Flags. You don’t understand product placement and native marketing at that age, that Six Flags is paying to get you to think exactly what you’re thinking at that moment: Six Flags has the most amazing coasters.

They’re all so far away. . You live in Central Pennsylvania, and if New Jersey seems a distance then Illinois and California might as well be different planets. There’s even a Six Flags in Ohio now, how close is that one to Geauga Lake?

You feel lucky Hersheypark even exists. And you are, because when you go Wildcat has PTCs and the fragrance of chocolate permeates everything down to the concrete.

But you’ve been to Hersheypark. You want to see a Six Flags in all its glory.

A commercial comes on the TV, professing how there’s now a Six Flags practically everywhere.

“Just a hop, skip and a jump away!” the announcer boasts.

You see the dots on the map, and you don’t know geography but you do read well for your age. You can read “Baltimore,” where Dad took you and your younger brother to an Orioles game a couple years before. You went by train, the first time you’d ever been on one. You went to Hooters and were most intrigued by the male server with balloons under his shirt. Your Dad reluctantly ordered you a whole bucket of clams, and you choked on one. He bought swimsuit magazines for you and your brother and the waitresses signed them as if they were celebrities.

At the game, you had the time of your life. At least a good enough time. You had ice cream in a helmet. The organ played “Pop Goes the Weasel” and when the scoreboard said “CHARGE” you yelled it with all your might. The ballpark wasn’t brand new, but new enough, and state of the art. Everybody was talking about Camden Yards, at least whenever you watched ESPN with your Dad.

Even in 1999, you don’t remember who played, who won. You remember every time a fan caught a foul ball, the announcer said, “Give that fan a contract!” You thought they were really getting signed to play.

Baltimore isn’t that far. We’ve made that trip before. From what the commercial said, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump. Why don’t they ever talk about that Six Flags in the shows? You have to go, you just have to.

Dad doesn’t agree.

It’s still 1999, you’re still the person who will one day type these words into a Medium.com text box, and you’re still watching TV with your brother.

But the show’s over. Some getaway beaches thing is on now. You go upstairs and put on your sister’s gymnastics leotard and prance around on her bed, performing halfhearted roundoffs. Mom encourages it, Dad does not.

You’re bored. Your sister stays up all hours talking with her friends on the phone. You’ve been told that’s the only thing teenagers do, is spend on the time on the phone with their friends. But it’s 1999, you’re the person writing this, and you don’t have a friend to call.

You leap and pose like you watch your sister do at her meets. You hop, skip and jump off the bed before turning to your brother in mock offense.

“WHY AM I NOT AT SIX FLAGS?!”