I Remember...

I remember songs, and not knowing where I was going. It was late fall and everything had a dark pallor about it, like it was wrapped in a shawl.

I remember fields of grey and green, and sun that shrunk behind dust curtains. There were abandoned buildings and woods. Our parents told us that they were haunted to keep us out of the coal gens.

I vaguely recall walking in punky forests, squishy leaves sinking beneath my feet. I took pictures with my cellphone to pretend I was happy. I captioned them with lines from Lord of the Rings as if I were tracking an Orc raiding party.

There was a stone slab, I called it an altar, and pretended that unholy rites took place. A huge rusted chain-component jutted out from a hillside. I called it Megatron's claw.

I remember in vivid viscosity how I ate nothing for weeks, and read Centennial in my grandmother's back bedroom to pass the time. I recall nothing of the book though.

The memory is fuzzy, and refuses to come, of the middle bedroom, and when he came back talking about love and coffee. There are things I punish myself for. I forget what they are. Self-punishment is so natural now that I can't even think of a time when I was happy.

I still remember the music though, guttural and feral. But the songs were always about other people, never about me.

I'm sad though, that I don't remember the fireflies, only the fights that I can't think of to save my life right now. I do, however, remember the first time I saw them when I was a little girl, and my mind fills in the blanks with what it was probably like. Magic has gone out of my memory, and I do the best I can to preserve the mental images left behind.

There were a few times when I was so strong that the entire human race would rise to its feet and be inspired, if only they saw me. But most of the time I was weak and struggling to hold a weight and a standard made for greater men, men who no longer had the spirit to pull heavy loads or build great monuments. I had to do it, and I did it. I remember that at least.

But there is no schema in the minds of modern America for people like me who defy, "go rogue" as he used to say. Only a few people have done it, and they keep very quiet about it. They're much stronger than I am to not need a role model.

But I thought that if I just...if we just...if he just...if they just...if everything just...it could work. But everything just...didn't.

I don't remember when it was decided that life was going to be a shaded forest covered in dark fog. I was too young or not born yet. But I do think I remember the day I decided I wanted to die. I was eleven years old and slept in a new room in the new house with nothing but salmon carpeting and a box TV. The chest pains didn't stop, and I masturbated with a pencil to keep my mind off things. They haven't ever stopped.

Some people hoard things, material possessions, even living things. The memories attached to objects are like family, and they build a home for themselves in the tangible world. I don't know if they stop seeing the memory when they stop looking at the object, but I imagine that's why they keep them, as talismans to trap their past in. I don't need the things, I carry them with me always, in spirit. And other people can throw the objects away and the memory it held within its ethereal container may eventually fade and be forgotten. I can never throw my memories away, there is nothing to dispose of in the physical realm.

So I remember, everything. And even if I can't recall it or see it, I know it's back there in my mind somewhere, gathering dust like the music boxes in my grandmother's attic that he loved. And even though that place will go and the bridge will fall and the car we went camping with but never made love in will be sold and the flowers will never bloom again in the strip of land that was bulldozed where we thought we saw the unicorn, and I'll deny that the songs spoke to me and the magic changed me and the churches and abandoned woods called to me and still do...

I will always remember you.