Confessions

“Come out to dinner with us.” She smiled at me. I liked her. I really did. We’d become as close as “work friends” can in the past year. So, it wasn’t that I didn’t like her and that I didn’t want to hang out with her. But there’s a line between “work friends” and “friends”. There’s a line between complaining about your boss with someone and revealing your life’s secrets. It’s a bold, dark line that stretches on in both ways as far as the eye can see and it is a line that I haven’t crossed in a very long time.

“Please?”

I forced a smile and nodded, the weight of my decision sinking heavily into the pit of my stomach. “Yeah, of course. Where?”

Somehow, Katie managed to smile even wider. “Great! There’s this little Japanese place on the corner of Matheson and Levin. Brian and I will meet you there. Tomorrow. Six o’clock?” I nodded. She waved, turned and started to walk away before spinning back around. “Oh, I almost forgot-is there anyone that you would like to invite?”

I didn’t even have to think about that one.

“No.”

I wished that Katie had suggested tonight. I hated the pit in my stomach that accompanied the mere mention of social activity. I just wanted to get it over with.

Katie was nice. She’d always been nice to me, since I’d first walked through the doors of the Excelsior Temp Agency. I liked working with her. She made me laugh and sometimes I even managed to make her laugh. But we saw the world very differently. Heart shaped rose tinted glasses often (metaphorically) covered her blue eyes and more than once she reminded me of the Shel Silverstein poem-the one about the kid who thinks that the toilet plunger is a hat.

That sounds mean but really, I was just jealous. I wished that I could be that effortlessly likeable. But I’m not. I’m only sort of likeable.

And I wasn’t very good at waiting.

The next day, after work, I went home and changed. I never know what to wear. I don’t want to come off as fancy, but I also don’t want to come off like I don’t care. Another line. I never know what to say. I don’t want to say too much and make people uncomfortable. And I don’t want to say too little and make people uncomfortable. It’s a line that I can see, one that you’re supposed to balance on, except that I’ve never had particularly good balance.

In the end, I wear a white v-neck t-shirt, a light blue cardigan, jeans and black flats. I look like I could be going to work, except for the jeans. As redo my makeup, I make a list of talking points in my head. Nothing about childhood, obviously. Katie will want to talk about something besides work. College, maybe? I like the way eyeliner makes my light gray eyes seem brighter. Pets. I could tell them about the dog I had just out of college named Galactus. I doubt they’d get the reference, but it would be a good topic of conversation anyway. I tint my lips with a light pink lipstick that the girl at the Macy’s makeup counter told me looked good with my skin and pull my brown hair up into a tight bun. We can talk about books. I know that Katie likes to read. Maybe her boyfriend does too.

I knew the place on Matheson and Levin. It was only a few blocks from my apartment and I ordered takeout there a few times a month. That was good. At least I knew what to order.

As soon as I saw Katie, the knot in my stomach started to unravel. She also looked like she did at work – blonde hair in a ponytail, gray dress, black tights and a green sweater.

Her boyfriend, Brian, was a few inches taller than her. He looked like he’d just come from the office, except that where Katie had tried to maintain her appearance, he was clearly just as uncomfortable in his work clothes as I was in social situations. He’d untucked his white button up shirt and had rolled up his sleeves to reveal an arm covered in tattoos. The only thing he hadn’t touched was his dark hair. It was still slicked back.

Before I could say anything, Katie had pulled me into a quick hug, I’d shaken hands with Brian, and we been seated at a table with a view of Levin Street- not that there was much to look at.

“May grew up in New Hampshire,” Katie said after we’d ordered our food and drinks. I clenched my hands together under the table.

“No way,” Brian said as the waiter slid a Coke in front of him. He thanked him and turned back to me. “I grew up in Manchester. You?”

That was an easy one. “Salem. Down on the border.”

“Is that the town that has that weird Mystery Hill place? The place with all the stones?” I nodded. “My class took a field trip there once when I was in middle school. Have you ever been?”

I ran through the possible answers in my head. Truth, half-truth, lie. I liked Brian. He seemed laid back; genuine. He had an arm slung over the back of the booth, behind Katie’s shoulders. Katie was watching the two of us eagerly. Every woman wants her friends to like her boyfriend. Or so I’m told. “Not that I remember,” I said truthfully.

“That’s too bad. I don’t remember much of it, but I remember llamas or alpacas or something. The people who run the place had a pen of them out front.” He chuckled, lost in childhood memory. “One of llamas spit on Billy King. Hit him right in the face. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer kid.”

“We should go sometime,” Katie said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or me. “Sounds weird.”

“It’s like a five hour drive from here.”

“So? We’ve driven farther for less.”

For a second, I caught a glimmer of a different Katie. A Katie unconcerned with scheduling meetings and making copies of contracts. A Katie who was instead, jumping into the car with her boyfriend and driving wherever just because she felt like it. I liked her even more.

Caught up in a memory of her own, Katie began to giggle. “Once, when I was a kid, my Dad took me to get ice cream for my mom because she wasn’t feeling well. There was this specific ice cream that she really liked – Peanut Butter Lighthouse Cup or something like that. But we couldn’t find it. Anywhere. So we just kept driving around looking for it. My dad was so stubborn, he wouldn’t give up. We finally found it, like four towns over and when we got home, we’d been out for like three hours and my mom was livid that we had been gone for so long. But my dad bought like six quarts of it and she was eating it for ages.”

I felt pressure building somewhere in my stomach. You know that feeling when someone says something and you have the perfect comeback, but you know that if you say it, you can’t ever take it back? But you want to say it so much. It was like that.

“I can totally see your dad doing that,” Brian laughed.

My head was buzzing. I wanted to tell them. I don’t know why-probably all of the talk about childhood. Why do we, as humans, always seem to revert to talking about our childhoods? It’s not as if they are all the same. Yes, we all have childhoods, but they are all so drastically different, that it’s often fruitless to compare them. And yet I see it all the time. No, I don’t remember that cartoon from kindergarten and as far as I know, I never fell off a slide or a jungle gym.

I wanted to tell them, but I knew what their reaction would be. It would be the same reaction that I’d been getting my whole life; sadness, worry, sympathy. I wasn’t sure that I could take another person looking at me so sadly, as if I’d been born without thumbs or something. I was fine.

But I always believed in being honest and in the same way that I was neither patient, nor social, I was also not good at keeping my thoughts to myself.

“I don’t remember,” I blurted out. They both turned to stare at me. I felt my cheeks burn. “What I mean is that I want to tell you that I don’t remember my childhood. Everything earlier than fourteen or so – there’s nothing. No memories at all. Nothing. High school is sort of fuzzy but I remember enough of it to know that I hated it because I didn’t remember anyone and they had all been going to school with me for years, but I didn’t remember any of them at all.” I stopped to breathe and took that opportunity to cover my mouth with my hands. I hadn’t meant for it to all come out at once like that.

They both stared at me. I could feel their eyes boring into me. I knew this was going to happen. I don’t know why I said anything. Now I was going to have to suffer through dinner and then Katie was never going to talk to me again and we wouldn’t even be “work friends” anymore and I was going to have to find someone else to eat lunch with and-

There was a look on Brian’s face that I suspected many people had often seen on mine. He was desperately trying to not say something. He failed. “Do you think it was aliens?”

Katie swatted him. “Brian! You can’t say things like that!”

I blinked. That was not the reaction that I had been expecting. “I don’t know?” I felt a giggle start to bubble in my stomach, and the buzzing in my head dissipated.

“I’m sorry, May, Brian is really into UFOs-“ she pronounced it ‘yoofohs’ –“but he never should-“

“No,” I cut her off. “No, it’s okay. I haven’t told many people before, but the ones that I have…this is the first time that I’ve gotten a reaction like this.” I smiled. “It’s refreshing.”

Obviously relieved, Katie took a deep breath. “Well, there are stories about changelings, which are fairy folk that are sent to replace human babies. Stories say that there are changelings that forget that they’re fairies and think that they’re human and go on living human lives.” I must have looked surprised. “Yoofohs aren’t really my thing. But folklore is. And I realize how that sounds now. I’m not saying that you’re not human buuut-“ She grinned. “I’ve seen how much avocado you put on your sandwiches and that’s definitely not normal.”

The giggle that had been welling up in me burst forth. Brian and Katie joined me. “I’m sorry,” I said as I tried to catch my breath. “I just didn’t expect your reactions. They’re not bad. They’re just different than I expected. Usually people just say ‘I’m so sorry’ or ‘that must be awful’, but it’s really not awful at all.”

The waiter appeared with our food – a bento box with chicken and a California roll for me, a bowl of ramen for Brian and tonkatsu bowl for Katie. We all stared at the avocado in my California roll and burst out laughing again.

“Or,” I said as I picked up a piece of chicken. “They tell me that I just must be repressing some terrible memory.”

“Are you?” Brian asked.

I took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. My parents are great people. I don’t have any siblings and the rest of my family lives in Arizona. I don’t feel – “ I waved my chopsticks in the air, searching for the right word. “- traumatized.”

“Is it weird?” Katie asked.

I shrugged. “It’s just normal for me. But when I tell people, it makes me feel like I’m confessing some sort of dirty secret or crime. And I get that it makes other people feel uncomfortable. But for me, it just is what it is.”

“It is what it is,” Katie echoed.

We ate in silence for a moment. I traded Katie a piece of chicken for a bite of her breaded pork and Brian let us both try the broth from his soup. I waved a piece of California roll threateningly close to Katie’s plate before she told me to get that evil green disgustingness away from her.

“I never learned how to ride a bike,” Brian announced as I popped the offensive piece of sushi into my mouth. He caught the look that his girlfriend was giving him. “What? We’re confessing things here.”

“For something that you claim to be ashamed of,” Katie replied. “You manage to work into conversation that fact that you don’t know how to ride a bike fairly frequently.”

I snorted and continued to eat. The two bickered quietly, and lovingly, for a few moments.

“What do your parents think?” Brian asked after we’d all stopped behaving like children.

I took a sip of green tea to wash down my food. “My mom thought that I was faking for a while. I think she was sort of offended at first. Like I was doing it on purpose. She finally accepted that I wasn’t lying. We just don’t talk about it anymore. Sometimes they’ll slip up sometimes and ask me if I remember Angela whatshername that I was friends with in first grade because Dad saw her at the gas station. Obviously, I don’t remember Angela whatshername and they feel bad about it. I tell them not to because it really doesn’t bother me. It’s just a part of who I am.” I took another bite of my dinner. The food here was so good. “It just is-“

“-what is is,” Katie finished. I nodded.

“Do you want to remember?” Brian asked. “There are hypnotists who can help you recall lost memories or regression therapists-“

I shook my head, cutting Brian off. “No way. I don’t need anyone digging around in my head. I’m fine the way things are. I don’t need those memories. Look at me, I have a job and an apartment and friends. I’m a fully functioning member of society without them.”

And just like that, we were done talking about it. We talked about the other things that had been on my mental checklist - pets, college and books.

While Brian stepped outside to take a work phone call, I leaned across the table and asked Katie if she and Brian wanted to go to the new Mexican place on the corner of Jackson and Stoker. I did it without thinking and as I was walking home that night, I realized that I was so far past the bold, dark line between “work friends” and “friends” that I couldn’t even see it anymore.