Nothing Goes Away

Now, I’m an instant photograph—an undeveloped Polaroid, seeking light to reveal myself. I’m composed of layers of amnesia—retrograde, antegrade. Pieces of who I am or once was diffuse into the painstaking, slow development of images. I’m not really an amnesiac. I, Michelle Kathleen O’Kane, am a Time Traveler. An object.

An object in time travels if and only if the difference between its departure and arrival times, as measured in the surrounding world, does not equal the duration of the journey it undergoes. In this place, the soft grey shawl and my knitting project are on my Anthropologie quilted bed. The book on my nightstand is The Echo of Old Books. My notebook, with its pinkish pages, waits patiently for more words—words I will emote before talking incessantly about myself and everything that used to be my life.

There was a time when everything felt possible. I wrote stories I believed in, and imagined new places and the hope of falling in love.

Memories of sharing meals with people I loved. Mimosas at brunch. Cosmopolitans before dinner. Vintage chardonnay with dinner. I wake up while driving in various cars, and I’m always the driver. Frequently, I’m on the unpopulated northern lanes of Highway 280, approaching the 92 exchange. Aware. While I’m driving, I surround myself with the color-changing hills. I’m humming along with Elvis Costello. Every day I write the book.

Now I drive west, heading toward Half Moon Bay. Always in my own car. Today it’s my blue Ford Ranger, the one I bought after my mother died. I was seventeen. She had only been gone a few months.

I pass the Half Moon Bay Nursery on the north side of 92. I drive through the edges of my town. My ocean, the salt in the air, blue sky, and the sea. White clouds stretch across the sun and water. I realize now how strange I have become.

I haven’t watched a movie with anyone in more than five years. I haven’t laughed with someone in just as long. Sometimes, something on TV or the radio pulls a laugh out of me—a quick, sharp sound. It surprises me. I hardly recognize it as my own.

Time is on my side. Gravity nudges me across cool, damp grass. Behind me, a 5’4” wide trail marks where I’ve rolled down the hill.

I’m jealous of many of the things I see on TV. And Instagram. Landscapes and cities and people at tables with white espresso cups.

“You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”—Margaret Atwood