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.
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.
