Erase you
These are the things she lost: the desert highway, a single lane cracking the parched earth, her parents in the front seat, their voices not raised but tightened. Her brother is sleeping beside her, resting his head on her shoulder and her stomach wants to revolt. She wills it to stop. Tight words, short. Her father takes his eyes from the road, his fist shoots from his arm, a move of precision against her mother's nose. The car goes silent. By the time they get to the motel with the pool and the sheets translucent as onion skin, the blood has left a trail down her neck and into her cleavage.
The smell of sugar and butter and flour, the standing mixer going on the counter, her grandmother’s fleshy arm, her swollen hand cracking the eggs. It’s a birthday cake. Or is it cookies? The memory is slipping away. She is left with sweetness and powder in the air, the oven radiating heat, the sound of talk radio in the background.
The boy with the scar just above his lip who stared at her for two years before finally speaking, his body language suddenly confident, the proprietary lean over her locker, his breath of spearmint, the circles of underarm sweat on his polo. He fades, turns into a man, and then the man becomes mist as well, all because of the night she picked up the telephone to hear whispers and dirty words. She read the pauses, pictured the work of hands and imagination, the power of language. And now the boy is gone, every version of him, the memories sucked away.
Spring. The soft green leaves, how they feel like thin rubber between her fingers, the competing smells of flora and fertilizer and liberated earth, the year she and her daughter planted sunflower seeds by the front fence. Every morning they would tumble from bed to see if the seedlings had pushed to the surface yet, the girl pulling her mother towards the door. Her daughter's first word was flower, she remembers that, and the memory warms her skin, gives her the feeling of dirt under fingernails. She pictures the arc of a hose, watches a pair of chubby feet stumble across grass. Flower. What does it mean?
What if. What if we could erase the bad memories? It’s a movie plot, yes, and also the premise behind the development of a new drug (or, really, a new application for an old one). Why not erase the bad? But what are we without our memories, good and bad, those learning experiences that made us? And what about the integration of sense with event, the way we cross-reference smells and songs with our stories?
Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne, the ubiquitous background scent of the 80s, reminds me of a boy I knew just long enough to suffer the consequences, The smell brings back his small lithe body, the dance where we met, the quiet bit of nothingness on a bed in the Little House that led to my ruin. If I couldn’t identify the source of distress – if the smell made my heart race, switched on my adrenals without me knowing why – then how would I interpret it?
Instead, I use this stuff, his wrist with the heavy gold bracelet, the swoop of hair over his sweet young Italian face, the inexperienced handjob in the back of a family car and the way the girl doesn’t give a shit but goes along anyway. There he is at the cousin's wedding, a plastic glass of champagne in his hand. There they are in someone's parents' house, sitting on the steps after another messy event. I see his tortured face hovering over her by the light of a television. She is silent, always silent, silent and enduring.
From the prompt "We finally did it." I know that this drug doesn't really erase bad memories, that it's more subtle than that, and I know this topic has been tackled elsewhere ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but it got me thinking.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I extended this one and it feels very much like a snapshot, a work in progress with lots of flaws.
Image by paulineRroupski.