I won't give up until I forget.
THIS IS ANOTHER VERSION OF MY STORY. I'm not willing to say that it is the final version, but I've added a little more than a page to the story and I feel like it makes it a lot more complete. I will love you if you read it AGAIN and let me know what you re-think. I guess.
10 days that unexpectedly changed America? I love you, History Channel.
Pills for Forgetting.
There. She’s that girl, curled up in the corner. Only one lamp in the room actually works and it’s making the already yellow enough walls (lemony, blank) just a little more yellow. Ah, that’s it, one little tear comes tumbling down, but it’s not what she’s focused on. Instead, it’s the pain in her stomach, a ripping stress nausea that almost has her considering making a move to double over the toilet. The stereo’s silent; she’s only visiting home and there’s nothing worth listening to. Wake up, wake up, only to feel sick, to wish she was still asleep, only to tuck her knees up and stare at a pair of scissors laying midway across the room.
Her phone stays plugged in on the nightstand; it also stays silent. And she’s waiting. Just waiting until he tells her when.
Sarah wakes up just a few weeks before and she starts a new habit, and it starts with her phone. She flips it open to read…that he’s actually gone and… (So glad her roommate isn’t there) she pulls a pair of yellow scissors out of the drawer. They scratch vaguely at her arm, and upon closer inspection she starts to see little slices like paper cuts forming. The whole area turns red, seeping small amounts of blood, not even enough to be wiped up with a tissue, less than a paper cut might have yielded. She doesn’t feel better. The sore hurts for days on end, burning a bit each time it catches on the fabric of her sleeve or the wood of the desk. In her head it feels less dramatic than someone who notices might make it. Numbly, dumbly, she goes back to sleep, too ill to be hungry, too weary to be awake for very long.
It seems ages ago (as they say), but she used to be happy. Or maybe not. Memory plays cruel tricks to make a person wish for things that never existed, to distract them from what’s right in front of their face. It’s a fact that she may not have been happy or all right for years on end, but at least there was a time in the not too distant past where she was happy for longer stretches than she can imagine now. At least in that time she had been loved, or at least she had been on. What does being on even feel like? It’s hard to get back, hard to remember, hard to pinpoint. But in those days the phone did ring, and someone did want to touch her; someone stroked her hair out of her eyes (a move she was always a sucker for).
The touch sticks most. No, it was the look first. That floats up, that haunts her most, the touch following directly after. This is no memory playing tricks; it’s instead more honest, easier to see, than when past was present. Memory is unclouding her, reversing its role.
That first look (someone else’s now, but it’s best not to think about it) in a car. Both sweaty and heaving from messing around the way kids do in driveways before going inside for the night. Twenty minutes past curfew on a Tuesday. Sarah lays her head down on his chest, not saying anything at all, just resting. For a second she lifts her head to look at him and as she does, it starts. The whole damn thing. It wasn’t their awkward beginning that got the ball rolling, it is this second. This second and not the halted conversation held at first.
“Charlie.”
“Yea?”
“I was just thinking…look I like you, and I don’t want to sit around thinking about it anymore. Do you want to try it out?”
Not that, this, and it can’t be stressed enough, because even if touch came first on the timeline, the look sticks first.
So Sarah looks up, just for a second, and there it is, smack dab in front of her face with no warning. A look that is…well, frankly, fucking impossible, however he managed to do it. No one had ever looked at her like that (she can’t imagine anyone will again, and even if they do, what the hell will it count for anyway?), probably not even her own mother in the delivery room. People always read in cheap books about the world shrinking to just two people in one second flat, to everything else fizzing out like flat soda, bodies melting flat against one another until everything else barely exists, and the world could be flat and have an edge for all they care because they’ve just fallen off it (on and on), but here it is, and no cheap books to be found anywhere. No one’s ever looked at her that way before and maybe no one ever will again.
It’s back to a year later, but at least she’s not curled up in the corner anymore. At least the hours have passed and she’s managed to get up and walk around. The mirror shows a glassy eyed look induced by crying, hair amiss, face contorted and there is nothing beautiful about it, no matter what romantic notions people like to cling to.
You can only sink so low in one morning…
Her parents are banging around downstairs, so completely unaware. It’s easier to wipe off her face, get composed and put up a good, solid front than to answer awkward questions or stare down the token worry-face that always accompanies any “serious” conversation between parent and daughter. Somewhere in the kitchen a drawer rolls shut, sounding a little bit like thunder. Picking up her brush she tidies herself up and freezes her face into straight lines.
It gets bad at night. The clock striking twelve, or one, or two brings a sour sickness to her stomach and renders it impossible to banish her own musings. Mornings are even worse, but the feeling fades as the day goes on, allowing faint hope and acceptance to blossom. Whether this is a blessing or a curse she can’t decide. These waves make it all the more difficult to return to that diminished state of being that arrests during the end caps of the day. A CD is spinning inside, an Irish voice tells a story to music that also spins and a book offers itself up to tell its story. And in her veins is her own story to tell, her own lamentations and plateaus scrambling to get out. Looking close enough she had always assumed someone could see that story in the lines of her face, the flush of her skin, her pattern of breathing, perhaps without ever uttering a syllable, that vague notions would sell themselves to another without having to convince or explain. There are stories and stories to tell, no matter how many have been told before and there was also a time when she and Charlie read each other without ever closing off. People are stories to be read, and before all the mistakes the two hadn’t been able to stop turning pages. The music spins on to the next song to spin another tale, and for now she lays there and lets it caress her arms, her face.
The touch became important as well, though not ever to compete with looks, eyes. His hands were, and still are, artist’s hands, with a certain clumsy grace to them. Not feminine in any respect, not quite soft but not rough either and they slid over her skin with firm warmth. These kinds of things occur to her upon waking, almost like they are the tail-ends of dreams straggling into daylight. She doesn’t want to get out of bed; she doesn’t want to go out tonight. She lays instead quite still in her own bedroom, so silent that she can hear the wristwatch ticking on the dresser, and with that sound she counts down the minutes until she doesn’t have to be in this place anymore because it’s just getting harder and harder.
There’s an actual moment when a person realizes that the house they grew up in isn’t really their home anymore. There’s also a time when almost any and all connection to a person’s parents feels lost. Sarah sits in the front seat later that night beside her mother. For some reason one of the back windows is open a bit and she can’t get warm. There are few attempts at conversation; the gap widens. Home-her house- had ceased to be home long ago, so this car ride comes as no shock, but it is a reminder all the same, because the silence just gets bigger and bigger and the road longer and longer.
They’re taking a trip to Janesville, an hour trip north into Wisconsin to pick up her father from an unfortunate and uncharacteristic incident. Her mother’s mouth tightens and cracking the silence like an egg, like a whip, she snaps, “What the hell was he doing up there anyway? He outright lied about where he was going to be today, and sometimes I just don’t understand your father.” The quiet sinks back in; she doesn’t say much else.
Something in Sarah’s stomach clenches a bit. There is always that persistence that everything is fine within the family, but every once in awhile she gets this feeling that nothing at all is right between any of them. This is one of those times. As a family they keep a lid on it, but there are unsettling relationships here, and lies, and tensions. And like any other family, the dysfunctional pieces build and build until there is this clogged artery of a unit of people, and things are anything but normal and okay between them but no one ever wants to admit it. For this the car ride is a little too long and the roads a little too black.
She takes her home back. As soon as she arrives back at her house, back on her couch she calls him. Upset, as usual.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but can you come over?”
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing. No, not nothing, but nothing new. And again, maybe nothing she feels comfortable putting into words. There is a moment where every person realizes that the house they grew up in isn’t their home anymore, and perhaps tonight wasn’t much more than a reminder of that fact. But ever since coming home this spring break there had been another reminder of another kind of home that was lost. At least he comes over.
“Now what is it? Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes I’m fine. I’ve just had a bad day.”
(A bad month, and all in my head where it’s hardest to get at.)
There isn’t much. Charlie sits with her on the couch; he wraps her in a blanket and wipes the stiff tear residue from under her eyes. It’s back, briefly, this little slice of home, because when the rug slipped from under her before, he had been there to catch her under the arms and take the place of everything that was missing. The rug was slipping out from under her again. The little sliver they had made for themselves (between here and there, alone, separate, cut off from the whole rest of the universe) was closing up rapidly. Here are its last vestiges, in tattered rags right here on the couch, and she is struggling. Comfort wraps around her, both physically (his arms embracing her, the scent and brush of skin) and spreading through her ever-aching belly and throbbing chest. Arresting her before the comfort takes too strong of a hold there strikes a rising panic. This could be the last time, things are disappearing, she’s falling backward and she had been able to come to him this time but there is no one to go to that can save her from this, from missing him. She might rather just forget.
She doesn’t say much about it to him. He can tell something is wrong, though. He keeps asking. She avoids the issue because what can she do? She could try and forget all about him, make all that part of her remote and shrunken, but right now maybe it’s just too hard. So the best she can do is shove away the rising panic and take what she can get. She lays her head in his lap and relishes his just being there. Home makes his last appearance. She can think about forgetting later. There is sleep for forgetting if not pills for forgetting, and the rain just keeps falling outside. It makes it easier to stay in, to sink in.
He isn’t able to stay long. He is only there an hour or so in the basement, making small talk, avoiding what awkwardness they can. They both know what’s going on here, the things they are giving into before they give it up. But eventually he props himself up on his elbows and nudges her saying, “I have to go. It’s getting late. You know how my mom is.”
The rain is still falling outside, but more softly than before. Sarah slowly pulls herself up, folding the blanket, keeping her gaze on him out of the corner of her eye. She hoists up her bag and nods her head towards the staircase. They walk, neither speaking a word. Suspended over the two and the house itself is something dark and muffling. It makes it difficult to walk, to speak, to even feel regular. Things seems too slow, too sticky, too distant from any reality. She blames the clock. The later it is the more remote everything seems. They somehow manage to make it up the stairs and to the front door. She opens it for him, and a soft spray of wet air and rain hits her face. Charlie makes the move towards a stiff and uncertain, but long and somehow comforting hug.
“Goodnight.”
“’Night.”
The door closes behind him. She watches him walk to his car, putting on his coat as he goes. His back to her. He’s gone, and who knows when he will be back? She goes upstairs, tucks herself in as if she were a child, and tries to sleep with rain and thoughts pounding on the window, in her head.
The weather is finally clearing. The air is even warm, and all this before she leaves home. Or leaves to go home. Which is it? Because neither here nor there does she feel any sense of comfort or relief and between them might very well be lost. The sinking, nauseous feeling persists despite the sunshine, despite the fact that everything else looks like it’s coming back to life. As it is, though, she has learned to deal with it, and all that is left are Charlie’s hands, Charlie’s eyes, Charlie’s smile. He might not even be a real person anymore. There are all these places floating around space where he’s supposed to be and he isn’t. When she gets to them expecting to find him, she doesn’t. A person can get used to that. What’s harder is finding a balance between how she’s supposed to feel and how she actually does feel. She smiles a little, practicing maybe. It’s enough to deal with the problems when they get there, one by one, and in the meantime hope. And never, ever forget.
10 days that unexpectedly changed America? I love you, History Channel.
Pills for Forgetting.
There. She’s that girl, curled up in the corner. Only one lamp in the room actually works and it’s making the already yellow enough walls (lemony, blank) just a little more yellow. Ah, that’s it, one little tear comes tumbling down, but it’s not what she’s focused on. Instead, it’s the pain in her stomach, a ripping stress nausea that almost has her considering making a move to double over the toilet. The stereo’s silent; she’s only visiting home and there’s nothing worth listening to. Wake up, wake up, only to feel sick, to wish she was still asleep, only to tuck her knees up and stare at a pair of scissors laying midway across the room.
Her phone stays plugged in on the nightstand; it also stays silent. And she’s waiting. Just waiting until he tells her when.
Sarah wakes up just a few weeks before and she starts a new habit, and it starts with her phone. She flips it open to read…that he’s actually gone and… (So glad her roommate isn’t there) she pulls a pair of yellow scissors out of the drawer. They scratch vaguely at her arm, and upon closer inspection she starts to see little slices like paper cuts forming. The whole area turns red, seeping small amounts of blood, not even enough to be wiped up with a tissue, less than a paper cut might have yielded. She doesn’t feel better. The sore hurts for days on end, burning a bit each time it catches on the fabric of her sleeve or the wood of the desk. In her head it feels less dramatic than someone who notices might make it. Numbly, dumbly, she goes back to sleep, too ill to be hungry, too weary to be awake for very long.
It seems ages ago (as they say), but she used to be happy. Or maybe not. Memory plays cruel tricks to make a person wish for things that never existed, to distract them from what’s right in front of their face. It’s a fact that she may not have been happy or all right for years on end, but at least there was a time in the not too distant past where she was happy for longer stretches than she can imagine now. At least in that time she had been loved, or at least she had been on. What does being on even feel like? It’s hard to get back, hard to remember, hard to pinpoint. But in those days the phone did ring, and someone did want to touch her; someone stroked her hair out of her eyes (a move she was always a sucker for).
The touch sticks most. No, it was the look first. That floats up, that haunts her most, the touch following directly after. This is no memory playing tricks; it’s instead more honest, easier to see, than when past was present. Memory is unclouding her, reversing its role.
That first look (someone else’s now, but it’s best not to think about it) in a car. Both sweaty and heaving from messing around the way kids do in driveways before going inside for the night. Twenty minutes past curfew on a Tuesday. Sarah lays her head down on his chest, not saying anything at all, just resting. For a second she lifts her head to look at him and as she does, it starts. The whole damn thing. It wasn’t their awkward beginning that got the ball rolling, it is this second. This second and not the halted conversation held at first.
“Charlie.”
“Yea?”
“I was just thinking…look I like you, and I don’t want to sit around thinking about it anymore. Do you want to try it out?”
Not that, this, and it can’t be stressed enough, because even if touch came first on the timeline, the look sticks first.
So Sarah looks up, just for a second, and there it is, smack dab in front of her face with no warning. A look that is…well, frankly, fucking impossible, however he managed to do it. No one had ever looked at her like that (she can’t imagine anyone will again, and even if they do, what the hell will it count for anyway?), probably not even her own mother in the delivery room. People always read in cheap books about the world shrinking to just two people in one second flat, to everything else fizzing out like flat soda, bodies melting flat against one another until everything else barely exists, and the world could be flat and have an edge for all they care because they’ve just fallen off it (on and on), but here it is, and no cheap books to be found anywhere. No one’s ever looked at her that way before and maybe no one ever will again.
It’s back to a year later, but at least she’s not curled up in the corner anymore. At least the hours have passed and she’s managed to get up and walk around. The mirror shows a glassy eyed look induced by crying, hair amiss, face contorted and there is nothing beautiful about it, no matter what romantic notions people like to cling to.
You can only sink so low in one morning…
Her parents are banging around downstairs, so completely unaware. It’s easier to wipe off her face, get composed and put up a good, solid front than to answer awkward questions or stare down the token worry-face that always accompanies any “serious” conversation between parent and daughter. Somewhere in the kitchen a drawer rolls shut, sounding a little bit like thunder. Picking up her brush she tidies herself up and freezes her face into straight lines.
It gets bad at night. The clock striking twelve, or one, or two brings a sour sickness to her stomach and renders it impossible to banish her own musings. Mornings are even worse, but the feeling fades as the day goes on, allowing faint hope and acceptance to blossom. Whether this is a blessing or a curse she can’t decide. These waves make it all the more difficult to return to that diminished state of being that arrests during the end caps of the day. A CD is spinning inside, an Irish voice tells a story to music that also spins and a book offers itself up to tell its story. And in her veins is her own story to tell, her own lamentations and plateaus scrambling to get out. Looking close enough she had always assumed someone could see that story in the lines of her face, the flush of her skin, her pattern of breathing, perhaps without ever uttering a syllable, that vague notions would sell themselves to another without having to convince or explain. There are stories and stories to tell, no matter how many have been told before and there was also a time when she and Charlie read each other without ever closing off. People are stories to be read, and before all the mistakes the two hadn’t been able to stop turning pages. The music spins on to the next song to spin another tale, and for now she lays there and lets it caress her arms, her face.
The touch became important as well, though not ever to compete with looks, eyes. His hands were, and still are, artist’s hands, with a certain clumsy grace to them. Not feminine in any respect, not quite soft but not rough either and they slid over her skin with firm warmth. These kinds of things occur to her upon waking, almost like they are the tail-ends of dreams straggling into daylight. She doesn’t want to get out of bed; she doesn’t want to go out tonight. She lays instead quite still in her own bedroom, so silent that she can hear the wristwatch ticking on the dresser, and with that sound she counts down the minutes until she doesn’t have to be in this place anymore because it’s just getting harder and harder.
There’s an actual moment when a person realizes that the house they grew up in isn’t really their home anymore. There’s also a time when almost any and all connection to a person’s parents feels lost. Sarah sits in the front seat later that night beside her mother. For some reason one of the back windows is open a bit and she can’t get warm. There are few attempts at conversation; the gap widens. Home-her house- had ceased to be home long ago, so this car ride comes as no shock, but it is a reminder all the same, because the silence just gets bigger and bigger and the road longer and longer.
They’re taking a trip to Janesville, an hour trip north into Wisconsin to pick up her father from an unfortunate and uncharacteristic incident. Her mother’s mouth tightens and cracking the silence like an egg, like a whip, she snaps, “What the hell was he doing up there anyway? He outright lied about where he was going to be today, and sometimes I just don’t understand your father.” The quiet sinks back in; she doesn’t say much else.
Something in Sarah’s stomach clenches a bit. There is always that persistence that everything is fine within the family, but every once in awhile she gets this feeling that nothing at all is right between any of them. This is one of those times. As a family they keep a lid on it, but there are unsettling relationships here, and lies, and tensions. And like any other family, the dysfunctional pieces build and build until there is this clogged artery of a unit of people, and things are anything but normal and okay between them but no one ever wants to admit it. For this the car ride is a little too long and the roads a little too black.
She takes her home back. As soon as she arrives back at her house, back on her couch she calls him. Upset, as usual.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but can you come over?”
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing. No, not nothing, but nothing new. And again, maybe nothing she feels comfortable putting into words. There is a moment where every person realizes that the house they grew up in isn’t their home anymore, and perhaps tonight wasn’t much more than a reminder of that fact. But ever since coming home this spring break there had been another reminder of another kind of home that was lost. At least he comes over.
“Now what is it? Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes I’m fine. I’ve just had a bad day.”
(A bad month, and all in my head where it’s hardest to get at.)
There isn’t much. Charlie sits with her on the couch; he wraps her in a blanket and wipes the stiff tear residue from under her eyes. It’s back, briefly, this little slice of home, because when the rug slipped from under her before, he had been there to catch her under the arms and take the place of everything that was missing. The rug was slipping out from under her again. The little sliver they had made for themselves (between here and there, alone, separate, cut off from the whole rest of the universe) was closing up rapidly. Here are its last vestiges, in tattered rags right here on the couch, and she is struggling. Comfort wraps around her, both physically (his arms embracing her, the scent and brush of skin) and spreading through her ever-aching belly and throbbing chest. Arresting her before the comfort takes too strong of a hold there strikes a rising panic. This could be the last time, things are disappearing, she’s falling backward and she had been able to come to him this time but there is no one to go to that can save her from this, from missing him. She might rather just forget.
She doesn’t say much about it to him. He can tell something is wrong, though. He keeps asking. She avoids the issue because what can she do? She could try and forget all about him, make all that part of her remote and shrunken, but right now maybe it’s just too hard. So the best she can do is shove away the rising panic and take what she can get. She lays her head in his lap and relishes his just being there. Home makes his last appearance. She can think about forgetting later. There is sleep for forgetting if not pills for forgetting, and the rain just keeps falling outside. It makes it easier to stay in, to sink in.
He isn’t able to stay long. He is only there an hour or so in the basement, making small talk, avoiding what awkwardness they can. They both know what’s going on here, the things they are giving into before they give it up. But eventually he props himself up on his elbows and nudges her saying, “I have to go. It’s getting late. You know how my mom is.”
The rain is still falling outside, but more softly than before. Sarah slowly pulls herself up, folding the blanket, keeping her gaze on him out of the corner of her eye. She hoists up her bag and nods her head towards the staircase. They walk, neither speaking a word. Suspended over the two and the house itself is something dark and muffling. It makes it difficult to walk, to speak, to even feel regular. Things seems too slow, too sticky, too distant from any reality. She blames the clock. The later it is the more remote everything seems. They somehow manage to make it up the stairs and to the front door. She opens it for him, and a soft spray of wet air and rain hits her face. Charlie makes the move towards a stiff and uncertain, but long and somehow comforting hug.
“Goodnight.”
“’Night.”
The door closes behind him. She watches him walk to his car, putting on his coat as he goes. His back to her. He’s gone, and who knows when he will be back? She goes upstairs, tucks herself in as if she were a child, and tries to sleep with rain and thoughts pounding on the window, in her head.
The weather is finally clearing. The air is even warm, and all this before she leaves home. Or leaves to go home. Which is it? Because neither here nor there does she feel any sense of comfort or relief and between them might very well be lost. The sinking, nauseous feeling persists despite the sunshine, despite the fact that everything else looks like it’s coming back to life. As it is, though, she has learned to deal with it, and all that is left are Charlie’s hands, Charlie’s eyes, Charlie’s smile. He might not even be a real person anymore. There are all these places floating around space where he’s supposed to be and he isn’t. When she gets to them expecting to find him, she doesn’t. A person can get used to that. What’s harder is finding a balance between how she’s supposed to feel and how she actually does feel. She smiles a little, practicing maybe. It’s enough to deal with the problems when they get there, one by one, and in the meantime hope. And never, ever forget.