Friday, September 19, 2014

Memory

Memory

She approached the filing cabinet, which seemed to be the only piece of furniture in the room and dragged a door open. The edges were sleek black and metallic. The handle of the drawer looked untouched. She knew this was not the case. The cabinet used to be filed with care. Each past experience in her memory was quantified in significance and filed according to feelings and significance in a diligent manner. Before everything became jumbled up, she could access a file whenever she wanted, pulling out a manila folder containing the appropriate context: place, time, scent and who was there. The room with the cabinet was an icy cold. In the Jumble it had absorbed a certain emptiness and with that emptiness came a bitter cold. The drawer felt cold in her hand as she pulled it open even.

While metal tends to adjust itself to the temperature of the hand touching it, this handle was entrenched in frigidity and showed no sign of moving. There was no one in the room with her who could witness what she saw when she opened the drawer. Everything that had once been organized was now a mess, many of her memories were torn into bits, illegible little notions of who had been where, or how she had felt. Everything inside her little memory cabinet was in pieces and there was no one to help her figure out how to put the bits back together or to make some complete picture of "the past". After all, it was her memory. Who else could come here? Who else would understand the system?

"I'm here for something specific," she said out loud, knowing that perhaps people could hear her, but there was no way they could tell where she was or what she was doing. Perhaps she would seem crazy to them. They didn't understand because their memory had not been vandalized like this. Their little cabinets -- or perhaps some of them had less old-fashioned filing systems -- were all perfectly in tact. Other people lived in the outside world, interacting with objects and others but she felt as if she mostly resided inside her head and her escape from all of that had been her memories which were now destroyed.

He had not taken enough of her when he left. It had not been sufficient for him to destroy the rest of the place. Outside of this room where the cabinet was kept, she'd had a beautiful arrangement of ceramic trinkets that seemed impenetrable to her, but in reality were merely ceramic objects that could easily be smashed upon the ground. And of course, when they were smashed they did so in little bits. With ease they embedded themselves in the soles of her feet and in other parts of her skin, drawing blood at first and later causing a dull throb more like a reminder of pain than pain itself. He had shattered every last one of her little trinkets and not being satisfied with destruction he set out to annhialite the contents of her cabinet.

She wept.

For a time she wondered how she would piece everything back together. Of course the past could no longer be reflected upon in the same way. Everything had to be re-transcribed for the cabinet's insides to be even close to normal. It would take work, which she had begun. She was always diligent and even it matters of restructuring the past she applied this same diligence. Through tears, through pain, through dull throbs, she had diligence at least.

Besides her efforts to piece scraps of paper together, jotting down what memory she could from them she was making new attempts to restore the contents of the cabinet so she could function. First there was the section of the cabinet dedicated to her "identity". It was probably best to scrap most of what had been destroyed anyways. It was not a pretty picture and now she felt more comfortable in her body, in her self. Her hair had grown longer. Her body had trimmed itself of excess fat. Her skin had been restored to a golden brown. Her smile seemed bigger and her notion of self was in general, more positive. What had been destroyed was all bad. Without memory, she could construct a new identity based off of her own feeling and not off of a projection on  a page written by a heavy hand.

She was also working on new memories that would effortlessly write themselves in and she could file them away, filling up the drawers of the cabinet with new material. One day at a time she worked on new memories that had nothing to do with him and his destruction. Then, there was a time when the memories seemed to be filling up the cabinet faster and faster.

She had made friends with someone else who could understand her system. His memories were destroyed too, but his "cabinet" (she was not certain it was a cabinet really) was in far greater disrepair. The hurricane that destroyed it was always on his lips, even after weeks and weeks had passed. She was afraid of him and his memories of her because she could smell the toxicity on his breath when he said her name. She was afraid because she did not want to brush too closely with his poison and disintegrate her new memories just when she'd built up a good thick set again. He was lovable and dangerous and they shared the same consciousness, the same skin, the same disrepair.

They never spoke of their damage but they communicated it all the same. She could sense the reflexive way he fell into things and could sense that she was a placeholder so he could perform the same habits of a lover he had grown accustomed to. He was a placeholder in a way, except the habits her performed were totally new to her. She had never been graced with this kind of affection before. This was the sign. Before every storm, there are signs of course. In the tropics, the birds are too quiet. The beetles pour into the house from every crack. He had just been an invasive beetle, pouring into her home, looking for a place to rest before the storm came. But he was the storm too... The storm. The beetle. The man. They were all the same - all black and twisted with satanic desire to defile what was once pure. (Heart, mind, home.)

They didn't speak of their damage but she could taste it on his mouth, like red wine, like marijuana. She could feel that sometimes he wanted to hurt her just to lash out at women. She could feel that she wanted to hurt him by falling in love with him and making their friendship some "big thing" to cause him guilt and grief. But their desire to hurt each other was tempered by their own pain, their own emptiness and instead of destroying each other their friendship became a blank notebook and they wrote in new memories to replace what they had lost. They guided each others' shaking hands and made promises they knew they could keep.

The future did not exist because they were so busy trying to replace the past with the present and when the future did come, they knew it would not matter what they were or what they had been because they had been nothing to each other but perfect and convenient. It did not matter therefore it did not exist. For a while they were able to write rich memories. Each second they spent together was a precursor to a romance they would never allow to begin. They lived in a world created by magic. God himself had a direct hand in placing him with her and her with him just for a time.

Time runs out and within weeks she was going on her way and neither of them wanted to feel sad but they both did. When he said "I miss you" she did not want to believe it because no one had ever missed her before even if they claimed to love her. Her absence had never been felt and for someone like him to claim to feel her absence felt like a grave dishonesty. In order to counteract this injustice she clung to the words "I miss you" and never spoke them herself out of fear that he was lying and she would fall into a cruel cosmic trap.

He seemed to really fall in love with someone else once she was gone and although she wanted it to hurt her she felt nothing for him, not even jealousy. They spoke to each other every day for more than a month and then time paired with their separation and began to chip away at their contact. Speaking to each other became less frequent. They could not help each other write anymore and trying to write new memories on their own became difficult. There was nothing between them but those truncated memories they had written before. Time had cut them off, God had left them to deal with their destruction on their own.

That is the only way she could fix the mess in the cabinet, to clean it up all by herself. The work would take a while. Piecing together fragments of her past under dim lamp light would be no easy feat. Her helper would not be there to remind her that others felt pain and that her presence was significant enough to be missed. She was afraid to tell him how much she missed him too, and how much he had helped her those hot summer nights. His laughter and the ease with which he provoked hers had profound importance, energizing her to keep up the work of reorganizing her memory. Sometimes she wanted to tell him this. "You are important to me" is only five words after all and they had spoken so much to each other that the impact of five words (one of which wasn't even love) could not be so great as to cause her this much distress. Whenever she saw his face and heard his voice, she could not bear to tell him because she feared it would change.

She became more and more alone as they were apart. In the world she had traveled to people did not understand laughter. They did not understand ways to heal from pain, only feel it. These people did not understand what she had been through. They did not understand why she felt the way she did. They did not understand that all her memories were destroyed. She had tried to explain to a few of them that everything in her mind had been destroyed. I am turning over a new leaf. I am trying new things. Her explanations were not understood. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like if someone could inhabit this near empty room with her and see the mess. How can you expect me to heal from this? How can you expect me to fix all of this so quickly? I have to rewrite everything.

Of course no one could come see the cabinet and the only person who had understood was hardly real anymore.

Time was passing again and writing was becoming difficult. She was bogged down with her life and with writing even when things did not deserve to be written. She was desperate for memories. Since she had flown away from him the face of her destruction was appearing ever so often to remind her that she was incomplete. There was a constant reminder that he had smashed everything in her head to bits on purpose and had ripped her memories to shreds. It seemed that when she saw him he would take a few of her rewritten pages and undo her work. She tried her hardest to forgive but she could not forget as easily what he had done to her. Escape was impossible because he seemed to always seek her out. Just by existing in the same physical environment he taunted her, looking wistfully at her as she tried to ignore him and pretend he was dead. How dare he look at her like he missed her when he had never said the words and when he had left her with such an awful mess.

Her summer was gone. Her memories were being ripped up at a faster rate than she could write them. Her mind was becoming poisoned because she had no memories to saturate its space and toxins were seeping in. She felt death calling to her as he had long before and this time to end everything seemed like bliss compared to this perpetual attention to fixing memories that perhaps could not be fixed. She could not even express affection how she used to and she noted that with the way she held onto her "I miss you"'s.

Distraught she decided perhaps it was time to die. She closed the drawer to the cabinet that contained her memories. It no longer mattered whether some memories were good or some were bad. Organization did not matter and it did not matter if she created new memories or not. She looked at the room which was now void of shrapnel although her body was not. She looked at the clean walls and the metallic box that held her memories. She ran her hand across all the surfaces in the room cleaning off a layer of dust with her fingertips. She closed her eyes and began to accept that she would be in this room forever. She slipped into unconsciousness as she willed it. Death was a comfort. A little too much of this or a little too much of that and everything was over. She would never be alone again and she could work on writing. No one could touch her or her memories again.

The room could remain sterile and pristine with no invasion. Perpetual purity was attractive to her. She pulled out a black pen and began to write her last words into the walls. She wanted to create a memory that would last forever, a complete story that would never need to be revised or rewritten. Without consciousness to add and change and reformat, she could work with peace that she'd never had when her mind was being destroyed. This was her magnum opus. The white walls of the room seemed to grow brighter with her acceptance of life's finality.

Friday, August 1, 2014

unusual compat

Summertime makes me sick with how sweet it is. I hope I will still be able to taste the sea breeze and remember warmth and soft kisses in a month. I hope I will be able to smell the dope in months to come and remember breaking it up in manageable pieces as he lies next to me. The beach is relatively quiet, the vague cacophony of Vybz Kartel is the only noise, a subtle reminder of what our culture is reduced to for tourism. “Our culture” that will never really be mine and may not even be his. But here we are, in sweet summertime, St. Lucians in our own right. I used to fail at finding comfort in the uniqueness of my relationship to my culture but now it feels so much better knowing that I am not alone in my cultural confusion. Mixed. Black. White. American. Canadian. St. Lucian. Preppy. Poor. Rich. Nerdy. Reformed Catholic.  Similarity in this amalgamation of identities has drawn us together in a casual yet significant manner.

“I left Saint Lucia and never looked back.”

But here we are.

The breeze whips my hair out of my face as I stand on the porch, ancient cordless phone glued to my good ear. The porch is covered with egg containers, each filled with grotesque dried seeds for my mother’s garden. Our pink hammock swings in the breeze and a giant lizard shiftily crawls across the ceiling enjoying a feast of moths and other insects my porch light has drawn to its strategic position.

I’m leaning over the banister trying to measure the length of my hair against one of our house’s pillars and I’m listening to his voice, reflecting my experiences. Another person has gone through what I’ve gone through. I am not alone. Relating to someone about boarding school is one thing, but relating to a St. Lucian is another thing entirely, and it’s too rare for our meeting to just be hap and stance. We speak for perhaps an hour as I stand on the porch trying to see the full moon through the thick clouds that paint the sky a deep gray. Our experiences in the United States and our relationship to our almae matres are so closely aligned. It begins with culture shock and a complete lack of preparedness to work. Catholic School killed our thirst for knowledge and our love of learning. Readers, dreamers and creators quickly became stifled by rules and our unbearable lightness a problem which is far deeper than being a tragic mulatto of sorts. Children were not meant to be beaten into submission, to have their creativity massacred in favor of conforming to God’s rule.

Then of course, there’s the guilt. Who else understands the guilt that I’ve always felt? It starts like this: I don’t deserve to be the only person to have had this opportunity. He tells me about his cousin: his potential, his wealth and how he could have fit into a boarding school environment if given the chance. But the value system of his cousin’s family is different. And that’s what it comes down to for “people like us”. Our value systems are polarized to the general population of our country. We become drifting anomalies who will never quite belong because we value education over possessions and knowledge over attainable signifiers of wealth. We would have never been comfortable in a Ministry Job or at UWI. So we fled and in doing so we felt guilty.

“There are so many kids I went to school with who were a lot smarter than me and where are they now?” It’s like I’m speaking to myself or listening to a recording of every previous thought I’ve had. I think about their salaries that amount to less than 20,000 USD a year and their 90,000 dollar car loans and their meager houses and the fact that they are trapped here forever. They are trapped by this system because they did not get a chance to experience the world that we did. Our exposure to the evils of liberal American culture frighten them the way the thought of being like them frightens us. We become bonded by our guilt and our fear, perhaps not in a romantic way or even in a permanent way but it’s significant for us to get all this off our chests and push it out into the humid night because we have had these experiences alone for so long and all we crave is understanding.

The night is beautiful. I’m thrown back to my childhood feelings of loneliness and finding the sort of comfort you find when you figure out your emotions are not “crazy” and not every thought you have is a representation of how isolated you are from everyone else. The landline is pressed to my ear as if cellphones don’t exist, as if I’m so far into the past I’m making the decision to go to Groton again and again. Was it a mistake? If I could go back would I do it all over again?

“It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to this day,” I say, and as the words leave my mouth, I am certain this time it isn’t a lie. Finally I’m speaking about Groton without feeling totally tainted by either resentment or nostalgia — opposite sides of the same coin if you get to thinking about it. In hearing him talk about the person he has become and seeing that he is a few years further along than I am in his personal development, I feel renewed faith that everything I struggled with had a greater significance.

Our conversation reaches a natural conclusion early into the night. How do I feel? Alive. It would be cliched if I hadn’t spent so long simply feeling like I was surviving. I’ve survived Groton, Middlebury, summer in St. Lucia, but talking to him I feel more like I’ve been living. The dichotomy between simply surviving and living has been exaggerated by my feelings of isolation. For once I don’t feel an emotional ticking time bomb like I need to act fast or feel fast or think fast about anything. There is simply connection at the most basic level; it’s the ability to truly empathize and understand someone due to a shared experience. I press the little red button and remain on the porch staring at what I imagine to be Castor and Pollux for a minute or two before returning inside.

Emotional momentum from the deep satisfaction I felt about relating to someone about my high school experience has the odd effect of slowing me down. There is no need to rush into friendship or into love or into fretting about every emotion that pops into my head. I am comfortable with the breeze whipping around my brown legs and with the end of a phone call and with the end of my past relationship and in a sense with all my endings.

How do we fit in here? We never looked back when we left yet something seems to be compelling a return to a home where we may not be able to fit in ever again. Was it worth it? The response could only be an emphatic yes. Looking back into the past has never lacked loneliness like this. Before I return to the sticky indoor heat I wonder if I’m really looking at Castor and Pollux, twin stars, connected.