I am prone to the act of unremembering.
I hang my aging memories out on strings and wait for their own weight to tug at them until they lose shape—for a fixed moment in time to lift off its line and become amorphous, moldable, pressed into new shapes.
Fresh in my hands like wet clay begging for form, my memories become what I need them to; a small mercy, a small lie. My memories bloom in the same stillwater where my other bad habits grow like algae, green on green.
But I do not try to break this habit, to surrender to time as an honest line in which every event always happens in its place, in its way, calcified and certain.
I choose to reremember swimming in the sea at the age of seventeen, mellow, and unassuming—my smile embellished with shameless unknowing, my body uncreased. The salt dried on my ruddy shoulders, the water mixed with syrupy chatter between friends whose faces are now blurred ovals of glowing light. The bubbles brushed my hair with the gentleness of a mother caring for her child.
The sun, brash and heavy, poured itself onto my bare, baby-soft forehead. Too bright to look at, too warm to refuse; I choose to remember a lack of sunscreen in my teenage immortality. I was collecting the first fine lines and creases across my face to serve as proof of my own existence and of lives never lived, never to be lived.
The lush air, in rememory, was filled with the fizz of citrus—tangerines that sound like velcro when the slices are pulled apart, disappearing one after another, moving like hands on a disappearing clock. Streams of juice poured down hands and elbows that aren’t my own anymore, wiped off chins that were too busy balancing chewing while laughing.
Things are gone when they’re gone, but that is a certainty too misty to hold onto.
I unremember and remember the first instance of wondering what it would be like to float there forever—to never have my feet touch the ground again—a thought so fleeting and wordless, I couldn’t be sure I’d thought it at all. Sometimes, I decide I never did.
This bad habit, like all such bad habits, comes with consequences. The danger is never in forgetting, but in the precision of what I choose to keep, when I choose for the memory to begin and end. I can make the water cooler and sharper against my ribs, I can make my friends into strangers, I can keep the tangerines in their netted bag on the rocky shore that I sliced my foot on. I can ignore the metallic scent and replace it with salt.
I find myself with half of myself existing in this spectral reality, made of what I never had, but almost did. Over and over, I press it until it gleams.
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