Memories & Amnesia: The Never-ending Story
Like a lot of people, I wake up every morning. I'm sure this is true because I'm alive. Again. I'm in a living room, on my back, on an oversized sofa. Staring at my hands, hands that still move and do things like hold a fork and bring food to my mouth. Spaghetti is delicious.
My mind is a storm. I can't stop the hurricanes. Happy, sad, embarrassed, confused, disappointed, scared, disparate. I never remember why I experience these emotions.
My phone says it's Saturday. I'm awake on a sofa. Awaking from what, I do not know. I close my eyes and process what I've just seen. Light. Too much light. Too many windows. Empty glasses scatter several surfaces. I inhale the hot, sizzling scent of bacon. That's how I know where I am.
Where do I live? Not here, on someone's sofa in a stupidly bright room surrounded by windows.
Home? I have two roommates, both of whom I like. One of whom is my son. Every morning I wake up and think of him, and he's going off to kindergarten. He's eleven. And I am thirty-six, about. It is 2019.
When I wake up, this house feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Nothing is. Every morning, I wake up confused. It's a storm, my brain is a hurricane, throwing trash at my skull. The garbage is my memories. Some of them belong in the trash, and some are there by mistake.
Moving hurts. Hips and calves and spine—my bones screech. The muscles don't remember yesterday's pain. Like my brain, my body parts remember very little.
I live with Louise, my best friend, and I have done so for over a year. I know it's been this long because she has told me, and I have written it down. I don't remember where I wrote it down. LOST NOTES sounds like a possible book title.
I do feel at home in my home. Everything becomes distant when I'm away from it. I think a lot. It occurs to me that I haven't left my house in days. People tell me to leave my home, and I want to. People ask me to do a lot of things, and telling me makes them feel good. I want to.
I remember that I got my clit pierced, and I remember spreading my legs on a sterile bed so he could stick the needle through my clit. The piercing hurt more than childbirth. A few weeks later, that barbell fell out of my clit, and into the playa's dusty ground.
A sidewalk. I have a destination. Lately, most of my destinations are a handle of vodka. I'm glad that I remembered to wear shoes because the cement is hot. I know it is because earlier I watched the news, and the person on Jake's television said it was going to be over 95 today. That person was a woman, and she smiled in a way that brought up the entire left side of her mouth in a straight line. I only watched her because I wanted to see if her mouth would touch her nose. She had a small waist. I imagined her driving a Saturn with two doors—just two doors for Ms. Sunshine.
I walk. My legs are drumsticks, which I repeatedly drop onto the concrete sidewalk. The cement, the concrete, the sound of gravel under my drumsticks, is a grimy rhythm. Like my memories, rolling in the dirt and being pelted by rocks. By words.
Words are crevices in mountains, and must be waded and climbed through. My drumstick legs are walking in the crumbling, dirty crevices of other people's stares. My heart hates thinking, figuring, remembering. I gave my life away, and now he has my son, and I cannot hear that voice of the person—that person who will always sound like my son. It's another sound I made, and I wish I could listen to it every day.
But. I don't have a phone, and I live somewhere far away, and my drumstick legs can't make a beat as we clank up the rocky mountains. I can't walk home. I can't walk into the ether--even if it's my ether. This I know.