I am barely breathing, and I'm saying WRONG WRONG WRONG and wiping my memories along with my conclusions. Everything becomes fuzzy: the sun melts into the clouds and I fall into oceans of grass with no blades, all dull.
Maybe I hate to be wrong so much that I try to forget that it ever happened, or maybe I'm just trying to purify my information and throw out invalid data points.
I would rather remember; I would rather be confused but remember it all. I would rather not have to dig for smiles because a subconscious part of my brain has decided that the important part was all of the tears that I didn't see.
I want to scream when I feel my mind moving like this. I want to install magnets under my fingertips that attract all of the beauty I have experienced, strong magnets that won't let it slip away because something pushes me to wash my hands while I hopelessly watch the salt and dirt flow into a porcelain sink. I want the sound of my voice to sing callouses over my life and protect it, there, where it is. I want to always be touching it.
Here is an example. The biggest loss of my life, since I have never been to a funeral. I remember when it started, but only because I wrote it down. I drafted our demise. The memory is like acupuncture needles in my chest, shaking with me when I cry, making raised red spots around the entry wound to remind me that they were there.
She received a felony in the mail. The wrinkled white rectangle spit out pills, round and white, like small wedding cakes. She saved them for weeks. With no particular auspicious sign, a warm, dark night slipped the envelope into her pocket, and a pill into her mouth.
She ran into traffic. Oregon traffic at 11 pm, so I really mean the road. Am I her mother? She was chasing a dog. We parted ways.
I found her again. Her core dragged her extremities like excess baggage. Her heavy head drooped to her heavy chest and heaved to look left or right. Her feet fell so hard that it's a wonder the concrete didn't shatter. She couldn't remember, which thrilled her, because the pills were supposed to make her forget.
She drooped and I sat, and the carpet held our bodies like a nest. “I'm taking another one,” she slurred. I ask about the proper dose and she said that she'd take all of them tonight. What could I do but trust the friend who sent them?
She didn't seem happy. She didn't seem
sad. She seemed in touch with her emotions, in the kind of way that
lets them boil over before they're completely processed. But her
emotions often get stuck in the processing stage so I thought it
could be healthy. It seemed alright. She didn't want to remember,
after all.
We follow our way into a new building,
letting others chose our direction. The rooms were brighter, and we
sneaked away to find an unlocked door with the remnants of an
Official Event left lonely, waiting for us. It was beautiful: a gift
and a privilege strewn with crumbs and cookies that hadn't found a
host. We stood together, invisible to the world, watching through a
window in the door. Bodies walked by that never looked our way. We
could hear the hullabaloo of Friday Night, so far removed from this
quiet treasure. Vases of flowers littered the room. I stuck elements
of the centerpieces in my hair, mostly roses and other blossoms. It
was pinned in such a way as to accommodate many of them, and my head
felt heavy afterwards. Maybe I felt closer to her. I wanted to put
some in her hair. "Only the ugly ones," she said.
Our raid complete, we returned to the
outdoors and spun dizzy circles all the way to the bus stop. We sat
on cool steps and she opened the envelope for the last time. “Where
are they?” There was only one pill left. She was confused, had she
lost them? No, I explained that she'd taken all of them. The last one
slid past her tongue at almost the same time that her frustration
found words. She yelled at the people walking in the dark, too far to
see: “Why don't you see how smart you are?” I guess I shouldn't
have assumed that it was them she was talking to. How loud do you
have to yell to reach your own ears? A question for the ages.
She said that she was unhappy, and I
said that I didn't know how to make her happy. She said it wasn't so
important to be happy, especially here and now. I told her that I
loved her, so much, like it was a consolation prize. She said I
didn't love her enough. She asked me if I was crying. She was
surprised.
The bus came and the driver asked what
she had taken. “It ended in -azapine” she said, and he laughed,
saying that they all ended in -azapine. She fell off of the seats,
denied the need for a safety belt, fell softly between the
passengers' feet. She tried to follow people as they dismounted,
mistaking their journey home for a pilgrimage to a party. She asked
me to marry her and for some reason it scared me. We got out at a
friend's house, and I was unsure if I should follow her in. I went
with her to make sure that there was someone there to look after her.
Ask she walked up the stairs she said “I want to die” and she
laughed and I stopped breathing.
It's not the kind of thing that you can
predict an arc for. Now I'm talking about the depression as well as
the drugs. The next evening she made sushi and tortured us by
drinking alcohol as we begged her to remember that people die from
that cocktail. She claimed that if she could make sushi she was
sober. Later she insisted: “I remember making sushi!” as if her
arms hadn't fallen like rocks, as if her neck had bones in it, as if
she'd spoken with her own voice.
I don't know if we're at the end of
this trip. I don't remember what it sounded like when she giggled her
flippantly suicidal remark. But I remember the angles that the
stair's made at that instant. I remember a gleam from the banister.
What am I forgetting?
We are far apart now, physically and
emotionally. I can't talk to her. It's too much for her and she
doesn't want to speak to me anymore. She says I've made it worse, she
says it as if she was prey and I hunted her.
It's not my friend in that body, it
hasn't been her for years. Or at least, that's what my censorship
tells me. I know that we held hands once but I can't feel her
fingers. I remember looking into her eyes and saying a spark that lit
them, glowing reflections of the incandescent bulb by her bed. I
remember clay in her hair, her laughter echoing in the cups she made.
But I feel like I'm inventing the memories. It's as if I wasn't
actually there. I was a ghost and she must have looked through me. I
couldn't have been there for her joy because when I walk past P204 I
can still see the silhouette of my outstretched hand when she told me
not to touch her. I can't be in two places at once. I feel a
marionette string holding up my arm as we get further apart, like a
tug on my sleeve as I stand in the hall and try to find smudges from
erasers beneath graphite lines that I'm suddenly pushed to retrace
and retrace. They're bold mistakes.
She says that she will contact me if
something changes, and that I should do the same. I should have
called her at the beginning, that night, such a difficult night, and
stopped this river from carving such a majestic canyon in us. We used
to throw around the word “soulmate” but now it sticks in my
throat--who designed that word--it is ugly and dry and fits no mold
that I have in my mouth.
This is not the story that I meant to
tell. I wanted to remind myself that I don't remember the pieces that
she said were lies. Eating chocolates in your room is a fantasy.
Driving north is a dream. Our feet, side-by-side, in the cradle made
of couches, like the smell of food from a restaurant I have never
been to.
These pictures are left out in the sun,
and they are fading. I took the glossy prints of her off of my wall,
because they broke my heart, I put them in a drawer. Some things are
lost to darkness, some things are lost to light, but I'm not sure
that she has a shadow because it has been so long since I saw her.
It's the end of the story and I've
found oxygen in my lungs again. I doubt everything. I will make up
these tales until I don't know what is real and when I see her again
I want the truth to drench me and saturate my mind. At this point, I
will believe anything.
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