Selective Memory
There isn’t a day she doesn’t remember. Flashbulb memories, her psychology professor calls it - the vividness of that one moment or moments. Smells. Sights. Sounds. Tastes. Touches - what she would give to forget, or at least to move on. Maybe repression would have been better, or if she hadn’t fought back and kept her mind so sane when she was feeling so insane - but she doesn’t want to think of that.
Instants for eternity. Polaroids she sees in her mind. Polaroids of her body and the betrayal thick in the air like the dust that can’t remove itself from the photographs. He betrayed her that night, and the next morning, and her body betrayed her mind.
It surprises her what she doesn’t remember, sometimes, just as much as what she does remember. She doesn’t remember when he left the next morning, or what she had for breakfast. She does remember seeing the newspaper - but no more. She can’t remember the headline - or maybe she does - or maybe she doesn’t. She sees black text but no words, pictures but no faces or images.
She has seen the picture of the aftermath. The picture of her standing alone, the rubble, wrapped in his coat, wanting and needing and alone. A life of memories, destroyed in instants she didn’t witness. The limited fragments of security she had pieced together like a patchwork - but the threads holding them together were too weak. She had seen them fraying, watched a lifetime of work disintegrate, powerless and unwilling to put out on the line the chance that something was actually wrong. It had been too simple to pretend everything would return to normalcy. Too simple.
As if she could drink tea with him over breakfast, strained conversation and even more strained glances, and forget everything but the tea by lunch. As if she could sit beside him on the couch, watching the latest news, and not touch at all, an uncomfortable space between them, and remember only that they had been sitting together. As if she could lie in bed beside him, facing opposite sides, and only recall that they had been together, once.
Instants for eternity. Polaroids she sees in her mind. Polaroids of her body and the betrayal thick in the air like the dust that can’t remove itself from the photographs. He betrayed her that night, and the next morning, and her body betrayed her mind.
It surprises her what she doesn’t remember, sometimes, just as much as what she does remember. She doesn’t remember when he left the next morning, or what she had for breakfast. She does remember seeing the newspaper - but no more. She can’t remember the headline - or maybe she does - or maybe she doesn’t. She sees black text but no words, pictures but no faces or images.
She has seen the picture of the aftermath. The picture of her standing alone, the rubble, wrapped in his coat, wanting and needing and alone. A life of memories, destroyed in instants she didn’t witness. The limited fragments of security she had pieced together like a patchwork - but the threads holding them together were too weak. She had seen them fraying, watched a lifetime of work disintegrate, powerless and unwilling to put out on the line the chance that something was actually wrong. It had been too simple to pretend everything would return to normalcy. Too simple.
As if she could drink tea with him over breakfast, strained conversation and even more strained glances, and forget everything but the tea by lunch. As if she could sit beside him on the couch, watching the latest news, and not touch at all, an uncomfortable space between them, and remember only that they had been sitting together. As if she could lie in bed beside him, facing opposite sides, and only recall that they had been together, once.