Remembering

Part 1

Your hair gleamed in the milky sunlight which streamed through the lightly dusted blinds of the lecture theatre. Its rich coffee bean colour illuminating as the rays danced above each curl, flooding each arch and trough. I watched as you raised your pencil to your mouth, your soft pink powdery lips moulding to exhibit an expression of content curiosity.

What a strange thing it is, is it not? To see someone so familiar yet unfamiliar. A face from the past, unchanged yet at the same time different. Out of touch, out of time. Yet my heart still faltered when I saw you. I’d thought about you, of course, I’d thought about you but not recently and not like this.

I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten you and us, been swept away in my world of artistic aspiration, in pursuit of a porcelain kind of perfection, that I should have known at the time, doesn’t exist.

And there you were in an English Literature lecture, an optional English literature lecture, typical. Yet I couldn’t tease you for that because I’d been myself, nose deep into The Bell Jar, the words of Plath echoing against dingy walls, walls that were far too mediocre to contain you, or what I remembered of you at least.

Do you remember when I read it to you? As you lay flat on my bed staring up at the ceiling with your oh so chocolatey eyes, vacant but alive, absorbing my words into them and sending them off fling into the galaxy of your thoughts. Were you thinking about me as that lanky blue-eyed professor spoke those same words, words that first fell from my lips and into your ears like dewdrops? Or were you thinking about what it would be like to sleep with the professor, like the rest in that room likely were? Me excluded of course; I was only thinking about you. Well, you Plath and I. Our love triangle from the past resurrected at last.

Please tell me it was me you were thinking of.

And that it’s not too late.

I know I hurt you and that I’m the one who left. That I made you believe I didn’t love you. But oh boy I did and not just as your friend.

It was more.

It was always more but it took me a year apart from you to discover that and by then it was too late. Did it take you just as long? Or are you still hiding under a rock ma chérie? I wish I knew; I want to know. Oh, there is so much I want to know about you.

Yet I can’t ignore that it is my own fault that I don’t know the answer to that question, or any for that matter.

Because it was my pride that had been too much, had been through too much and nineteen-year-old me was never going to rake her white coat in the mud over her disdain for a boy.

Your boyfriend. Now, fiancé, husband, ex? Please be ex. The thought of that slimy bastard having any connection with you causes an immediate rise of bile.

I should have protected you.

Because that’s what we do, do we not? Protect the people we love?

What does that make me for walking away?

A monster?

Selfish?

No. What it made me was ‘not yours’.

Part 2

I’m staring at myself in the mirror, my murky grey eyes look oddly frightful and stern. My hair is auburn, not the blonde you once touched, and I suddenly feel a soft boiling anger towards myself for dyeing it. But luckily something else catches my eye that returns my emotions to a soft simmer.

I reach out for perfume and think to myself, now this you’ll remember. A waft of this is sure to send you on the nostalgia train to a time when we were braless teenagers wearing soft socks and sipping coffee we didn’t like because that is what our French frenzied dreams dictated we should. If our dreams were a language they’d be French mon amour, maybe that’s what drew us to each other. Two distinctly different individuals whose dreams spoke the same language. Now isn’t that romantic?

It took me a lot to not approach you yesterday, but you looked as if you were in such a hurry, there was a flutter of a butterfly in your dark lashes, a look of frustrated concern, as is you were trying to remember something important. I didn’t want to hold you up any further, nor did I want to rush our reunion. When you see me after all this time I want to have the liberty of reading your expression like a deliciously filling book. Because, if this is to be our last meeting, I want to savour each and every page.

Though now here’s a funny thing, when looked closer at you I realised your lips weren’t powdery pink but rouge-like that of the film stars I fawned over in our youth. It’s peculiar how our minds play tricks on our perception. I think I was seeing an amalgamation of my version of you and the ‘not mine’ version of you now. Maybe it just didn’t sit right in my mind that you would wear such a colour. It’s me, not you. What happened in your life to make you choose it?

Did someone break your heart?

Was it him?

Was it me?

Either way, it suits you. As does the black leather jacket and those expensive boots, I wonder why you picked them? As armour? I know those sharp edges and dark shades encase such a soft, soft heart. From what are you hiding?

I hear a sharp sound of a horn from outside and swear coarsely at the driver for interrupting my thoughts of you. Each one feels so precious. The driver beeps again, and I scowl. I take another quick look in the mirror and then I stride out to the taxi, slipping into the back seat and slamming the door shut. I sigh after confirming the address and sink back into my seat.

I’m so close to seeing you. I try to forget that I’ve in some ways risked it all, that even though I’d watched you nod to the question of whether you’d be attending this meet and mingle event for fellow literary artists, there’s a chance that you were lying or would change your mind, fall ill, be hit by a double-decker bus and be rendered incapacitated.

My fingers grip my seat and I grow suddenly tense and ice cold. What if I’ve lost you again? My eyes grow large and slightly mad at the thought as I try to fight my own mind for decorum.

No. No.

You will be there. It’s fate. It’s fate to see your face thousands of miles from where we first met, it the city of innumerable faceless humans.

I must have faith.

And just as that thought rests in my brain, like an autumn leaf falling on the pavement, through the glass of the taxi’s window, I see you.

Part 3

I don’t know what comes over me, but I find my body moving before I can tell it too, I pay the taxi driver who looks slightly concerned. He was probably worried I was going to jump out of the car without paying because the second I did pay, I did just that. I didn’t leave that car. I fled it.

You look lovely. Your hair is up in a tousled mess of curls that somehow manage to look both adorably messy but gracefully elegant at the same time. You look like a cup of warm cocoa and a shot of tequila, like the itch to a scratch. Surely everyone else here can see it too and I look up for a second to test my theory by surveying those chits chatting in small bunches outside the marquee around you. And alas, I see the gazes of several individuals flit from you to their inattentive companion, then back to you and then to their drink, which is not really what they’re drinking because they’re drinking you, you see. Well, you don’t. I see it but not you. You have a look in your eye that just speaks of a blindness to it all. Like your head is filled with too much muchness to comprehend anything so subtle as quiet adoration.

Let’s fix that, shall we?

I walk to the bar and swiftly down a shot and drown the pain and suffering of our history by swallowing hard.

Then I walk confidently towards you and pause…

Your eyelids flicker up to meet my gaze and I wonder is your heart thumping and your stomach clenching like mine is like mine did when I saw you again.

You smile brightly and I feel a cascading sigh of relief that you didn’t throw your drink at me.

Better yet you’re happy to see me.

I return the smile and step closer to you, fumbling in my mind for an appropriate opener, ‘I’m sorry’ feels too heavy, ‘It’s been so long', too weak, eventually I settle for your name and I’m about to speak it when I hear you say it yourself.

Followed by a generic introduction.

The cogs of my mind jerk with a sharp halt.

Are you messing with me? I know I chopped the cords between our hearts, but baby don’t turn mine into sawdust.

“And you are?” you ask me sweetly, despite me appearing as if I’m having some sort of mental fit.

You’re not joking, I can see it all across your face now.

You don’t remember me.

“Eve” I choke out a reply for the sake of time turning once more and then almost cry out “Evie”. You never called me Eve. It sounds like sour lemon and all kinds of wrong.

“Evie are you alright?” you ask with a face of such genuine concern I’m almost tricked into believing you’ve remembered me. How could you not?

I know you felt it too. There was a pull between us throughout all the time we knew each other. It’s here now radiating from me in pangs, why can’t you feel it?

You touch my bare shoulder with a look of flurried worry, your doe eyes so deep and caramel right up there in front of me and I can’t bear it.

I take your hand softly and smile again as if to rewrite this moment, like restructuring a chess game after a hefty loss. I pick white and make the first move.

“Maya it’s me.” I breathe in puffed breaths somewhere between incredulity and exasperation.

“I’m sorry, have we met?” you reply, and something knocks in my chest harder.

I trace my thumb across your fingers and your eyes narrow suspiciously, but you let me keep hold of your hand.

“We went to Riverside High together.” I try again thinking surely that should do it.

You pull your hand back and touch your temples.

“Ahhh Riverside” you exclaim, and I think finally but then before I can speak you add, “I’m so sorry I don’t remember an Evie from Riverside High but I’m glad to have met you.”

“Gosh that was years ago,” you add while my bewilderment heightens to a crescendo.

And that is when it hits me. Like your badminton racket during 4^th period that one Wednesday in high school.

You really don’t remember me.

You really don’t remember our letter exchanges, dinner at my parents, trips to botanical gardens, me playing you Claire de Lune to lull you to sleep and you murmuring ‘again’ despite being hardly conscious.

It’s been five years, not fifty.

These aren’t things you’d forget.

“You’re a poet for god’s sake.” I find myself muttering and suddenly you look at me confused and a little scared and before I can stop you, you’re scratching your temple and saying.

“It’s lovely to see you but I really ought to go find my friends.”

Which I know immediately is a lie from the way your lip quivered in hesitation for a brief moment before you spoke it.

My mouth opens and closes like a dumb goldfish but your back has already turned.

Then just as abruptly as I disappeared out of your life you’re out of my presence and I feel too sick with unease to go after you.

Part 4

My fingers with their manicured tips are curled around the edge of the sink that holds my sixty-three kilograms as I press into it broad-shouldered. I’m in the dim, orange lit bathroom at the event venue and can feel a sweat forming in the crook of my armpit.

Is this it? Do I leave?

Also, what in the name of sanity is going on? How on earth do you not remember me?

How could this be possible? I take a deep breath and try to reason and after a minute or two my brain drops out three possible scenarios like lotto balls, they spin painstakingly slow and land metaphorically in my palm. Because yes, this is in my hands after all. A choice I need to make.

Number one, amnesia. It’s been five years, it’s very much possible that you’ve been hit by a bus since then, or two, you were always clumsy.

But then why didn’t you just say that, surely you’d be self-aware enough to consider I might be one of the people you’d forgotten, you’re too smart to have not to.

So, scenario number two, you’re not who you say you are, somehow you have some sort of secret family memb-

No. I can’t even continue with that one, it’s you, every ounce of you is Maya, five years might have considerably changed you, but you are you, the same spirit.

Which brings me to three. I look up at the mirror and catch embarrassment wash over my face as I think it.

Magic, divine/satanic intervention.

Maybe I’m cursed I think, maybe this is my curse for doing the worse thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Leaving you.

I blink in the mirror and notice a woman is staring at me with disdain, I realise I’m blocking the sink. I cut her a look before vacating the area stepping back out into tall, solitary gallery area, where the ceiling is entirely glass and looks out at the night sky. I hadn’t noticed this before being in such a hurry. I look up now and drink it in like the neat scotch I’m in need of. The stars are out in all their glory and it feels like they’re taunting me by dangling secrets about this quest before me, in some foreign tongue.

‘The stars know everything’ you’d once whispered to me playfully and I wish I could remember what you had been teasing me about.

I keep my head hung back staring out at the stars until eventually my neck begins to ache and I come to yet another painful realisation.

There is another possible explanation. Explanation number four, the one I want least to be true but probably the most plausible.

You simply don’t remember me.

Maybe I didn’t mean to you as much as you meant to me. Maybe I hurt you so bad you did your best to forget me and succeeded.

And here I am selfishly in pursuit of you, angry even, at you, for not remembering.

I laugh borderline manically and cover my face with both my hands. I find myself squatting bent over on the ground and think, oh god.

What if I’m mad? I’ve teetered close enough to the edge in my lifetime, maybe this is some manic episode. Maybe I’ve lost it.

No. I stop myself. No. I repeat firmly. If there’s one thing I’m sure about it's you, I dare not even taint the memory of you, even more so now knowing it is likely I will never see you again. That is something I will just have to come to accept and it’s nothing more, if not less in comparison to what I put you through.

So, after a deep breath, I un-cup my hands from my face and blink a little, noticing that my palms are slightly damp from the remnants of unconscious tears. I reach into my pocket to pull out my handkerchief in aim to look a little less looney when I rise up and that is when it happens, all in serendipitous succession.

One. I hear a chink and thud and notice something has fallen out of my pocket; I realise it’s the pocket watch you got me for my birthday, it has Que Sera Sera on it, engraved.

Two. As I reach my hand out for it I stumble and my palm lands flat on a tile.

Three. As I pick up the watch I realise the floor is covered in quotes, each one of them on a different little tile covering every inch of the floor. I read the quote that was below my watch.

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am”- Sylvia Plath.

Four. And that is when I hear your voice. Near me, close to me, above me. I look up to see you frowning and then you’re helping me get up, pressing my watch that you gave me into my palm.

“Evie, do you need me to call someone for help?” you say worriedly and that is when I do it.

I kiss you. Unexpectedly, ardently, with every last shred of hope, sanity, and a fair bit of insanity, thinking even if you end up slapping me it’ll have been worth the shot.

But luckily, it doesn’t end in police reports and an icepack because when I open my eyes and see yours, I know for certain you remember and then, you kiss me right back.