Well, I had assembled my tools. With as much haste as possible, and it hadn’t been fast, honestly, despite feeling that amorphous sense of formless dread, the pressure pushing on my awareness constantly without any knowledge of where it was going to happen, or when.
Now I have them. Pens, inks. A selection of flawless new notebooks.
The first line in a pristine notebook is always a little fraught. That paper, so innocent. And here I am, intending to put a mark down that would scar it forever.
Maybe the real reason I burned my notebooks was that I didn’t want the responsibility.
Maybe that’s also why I never had children. Just stories.
Nobody really remembers if you screwed up any given story, five years after the fact.
Erase, erase, erase.
There’s freedom in not being important. In not being seen.
I can’t touch food for three days. Unfortunately, not being able to touch the food does nothing to keep me from getting hungry.
There’s so much to forgive yourself when it comes down to it. So many little cysts of self-hate and personal despair.
“I need you to keep your promises,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.
He promised easily. Fluidly.
Meaninglessly.
And I kept on believing him. Forgiving him.
Making excuses.
I was so good at excuses.
Not for myself. I was always culpable. And I always found ways to punish myself. I believed it when he told me I was wrong. My perceptions, my understanding of events. When he told me I must be crazy, because what I remembered hadn’t happened that way at all.
I was unforgiveable. I was sure.
But then I asked him to keep his promises.
And I started writing his promises down. In my notebook. With my pen.
I find the damaged pen in a box I didn’t know had any pens in it, at the back of a deep cabinet shelf. I rattle it reflexively, not expecting a sound. But there is weight inside it, and something shifts.
I open it and find a narrow, black, beat-up old fountain pen I cannot identify.
I mean, I know what pen it is. It’s one I must have been given by a family member but I can’t remember what the occasion was, or who had given me it. I had used it all through college after I lost my graduation pen. But I don’t know what kind it is.
It’s missing the gold trim band on the cap, and the cap doesn’t close and lock. I remember it having a satisfying click when I shut it. It’s so slender I used to tuck it inside the spiral rings of my notebooks. It lived there. It was a good pen.
It is full of dried ink, because I am a terrible pen custodian.
I check the collector websites and can’t find anything like it.
There was a time I was a bad friend. I was in love with somebody, and they were in love with somebody else, and I was in love with that person too. Looking back, I don’t think either of them loved me.
I didn’t handle it well.
I remember sitting in a bar in a bad chain restaurant breaking up tortilla chips into crumbs with my fingers because I needed something to do while my friend broke up with me, and I didn’t have the will to eat them.
And I’d already picked the whole label off my beer.
I tried to make amends, years later. I can’t blame them for not wanting to talk to me.
I could have done without that memory. I had, for years, I now realize.
Accountability. That’s another thing you lose when you erase yourself.
Thank God.
Some of the pens start slipping through my hands. At first, the newer ones, or the ones that had been bought as replacements for ones long lost. The older ones fare better, as if every scratch on the barrel, every bit of luster worn by use from the nib, every imperfection, makes the object in my hands more real. Or gives my hands something to stick to, as they become more phantasmal. More of an unreality.
The older ones fare better. At first.
Then those begin to fall through me, too.
There is so much I still can’t remember. I frown at those pristine notebooks with their smooth, friendly paper. I stroke a finger over them, and sometimes I feel the nap of the page, and sometimes my fingertip sinks through.
I know—I can feel—the memories down there, like shipwrecks under clouded water. But I can’t make out the shapes. Can’t describe what I know has to be there.
I start dropping even pens.
But I never drop the broken one. It feels steady and solid in my hand. As if it were more real than the others.
That gives me an idea.
They used to say, of somebody who made a bad marriage, that they threw themselves away. What happens if you never actually got married, because marriage is a tool of the bourgeousie?
I’m pretty sure you can still throw yourself away. Erase yourself. For somebody else, or because you don’t think you are worth preserving.
I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgot.
My stepfather liked to have excuses to hit. So he could feel good about himself, I guess. One way you get excuses to hit is to expect perfection in every task, and set hard tasks without allowing the person you’re setting them to time to learn how to do them.
Then, when the student isn’t perfect, you have a good reason to punish somebody.
Another thing you can do is change your expectations constantly, so that nobody can predict what is expected and what isn’t. Make them arbitrary and impossibly high. Don’t allow for any human imperfections.
Since I can touch it, I decide to fix the mystery pen.
I make a new trim ring for it out of polymer clay, to help hold the cap in place. I clean it, and while I handle it my hands stay solid on the tools. As if it is some kind of talisman to my past reality.
I wish I could say my repair job is some kind of professional affair with a loupe and so on, but I have some epoxy and some rubber cement and honestly I kind of fake it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s all right then.
I take up my broken pen. The nib is still pretty good, though it doesn’t write like a fine point anymore. More like a medium. And even on smooth paper it scratches a little.
It’s still usable, though. And it makes a nice smooth line.
Except I have faded more, in the interim. I am vanishing. Falling away, like all the memories I hadn’t wanted, and now wish I had been less cavalier with. I can’t manage to open a notebook, let alone write in one. I am able to re-read the old ones I’d kept. But the new ones are as ghostly as the cheese sandwiches have become.