Apropos of nothing
I walk my fingers back and forth over my thigh like a child playing marching soldiers. I play other games, too, none of which I can describe here, or in detail. I whisper intimacies into a hollow vase so it sounds like I’m keening underwater. I check in on you; your breath sounds like a metronome. I walk out of the room. I keep the walls up between us. I keep on going until the end. The end is a hallway, three-quarters overgrown with multiple meanings. You know, it's strange, but I can't remember you the way I remembered you when I first left.
•
I’ve been told that photographs are more than just a repository of memories, that they are, in fact, memories themselves.
I don’t know about that.
I’ve discarded Kodak prints, pictures from passport booths, even those vintage Polaroids that are romantic in and of themselves. As fond as I am of their fadedness, their odd-tintedness (sometimes orange, sometimes red), I can look at them once and never have the need to look at them again. I’ve also wiped images from flash drives, thumb drives, hard drives, and emptied my camera roll more times than I care to count, always eschewing the safety net of a backup.
Today, the act of erasure is as easy as it’s entertaining. And there are options catering to every degree of decisiveness: Cancel, Undo, Delete, Delete Forever, Are You Sure Want to Delete Forever?
I understand that photos do offer a sense of legitimacy. They anatomize someone, visualize a moment or a milestone. They bear witness to the fact.
Here’s the thing. My body is incidental, so it doesn’t need to be legitimized. The existence of those I love is carved into me, so their presence translates constantly as a sensory experience. I’m tetherless, so my legacy is futile. And my life is just a story I tell myself over and over (a flower blooming in the isolation of my own subjectivity), so accuracy is never the point.
Once, I was asked about the purpose of people “making memories.” I could only posit, of course, as I’m not “people.” I’m an outlier.
Perhaps people like to travel back in time, when most of their actual living is done in the past. Perhaps they want to feel something apart from what they’re feeling now. Perhaps they think the present is liminal, and the journey only goes back and forth.
For me, memories are compulsions—I can’t make them; I just have them. Now and again, they’re a burden. And often, I just want a clean slate.
Are You Sure Want to Delete Forever?
Yes.
•
(A leaf falls and the sound splinters the earth.)
I own a book of poems by e e cummings. It’s probably somewhere in the randomness that is my bookshelf. I didn’t quite understand his poetry when I was younger, but I always thought his words held secrets.
This is a secret. Sometimes, I dream of an eternal pit, and then a long, long tunnel with a bright light at both ends. Sometimes, I see the cords come undone, and the lost come home. Sometimes, I say the names of the lonely, and sometimes, I say my own.
•
When I was a child, until I was about 10, we drove to the sea every year when the city became unbearably, abominably hot.
We would know we were close—the car would stutter forward over that section of road that wasn't as smoothly paved. It was like a message of understanding exchanged over Morse code, a changing of the guard between where we had been to where we were going.
At the end of the day, after hours in the water, I would lay in bed with the motion of the waves enveloping me. If you could go back, far back, to when you were in your mother's womb, would it have felt this way? Your tiny organs like little hanging lanterns, rocking inside the lone boat that is your body, moored to the harbor.
"Do you feel that?"
"No. Go back to sleep."
Why is it that when someone tells you to go back to sleep, you never do? I stay awake, wondering if it’s possible to be complicit in my own wakeful drowning.
•
(Or, how to tell a story backward, years later.)
The wine is what finally put me to sleep, but I also recall that I had some chocolate and cake and cheese before that, and painkillers even earlier. We decided to forego the night market, which is just like a farmers’ market on caffeine, and had tea instead. The rest of us walked from Chelsea to Breton. Three in our group left early, right after the meal, about an hour or two after the gifts were opened. There was laughter then, louder than what was acceptable. The waitstaff took our pictures; all came out blurry. We ordered some syrah, too, but got chardonnay in its place. More food, we agreed. Everybody else was already there, surrounded by dishes and platters nearly scraped clean. Better late than never. He asked me to meet him so we could walk together, but he had to wait a while—the bus I was on lingered too long at the previous stop.
•
In remembering her fellow poet Molly Brodak, Gina Myers wrote: “Less than two weeks before she died, Molly tweeted, There’s nothing after death and I’ll see you there.”
I’ll see you there.