Maybe this is better than living with the pain of remembering. Maybe fading away, fading into nothingness, starving to an immaterial and non-interactive death—maybe that is the happiest ending.
Except the one thing I know—I know with a drowning urgency, though I still cannot remember the specifics—is that people will come to harm if I cannot remember the things I once knew.
A lot of people.
And not just hurt.
People are going to get killed.
More people. A lot more. Exponentially more than had been harmed by three incendiaries sent to medical schools.
If I can just remember the plan I came up with. Before I helped him write this manifesto. Almost twenty years ago.
If I can only remember the rest of his name.
Lack of food and water doesn’t help me think any more clearly. I’ve never been good at handling low blood sugar. So half my time seems to be spent figuring out how to write. How to even get words down on the page.
I can put the pen on the paper—the pen stays solid, even if it is in my hand. And I can use the nib to turn the pages. But do you know how hard it is to write legibly and usefully in a notebook you have no way to smooth flat, or to steady? Especially when your temples ache with hunger, and a sour metallic taste seems to sit in your abdomen.
My laptop has long since stopped being something I could touch. I would have given a lot for that laptop right now.
My laptop. And a banana.
My stepfather would hit me with a belt, and he wouldn’t stop until I managed to keep from crying.
“I’m not hurting you that badly, you little wimp. Quit that squalling, or I’ll give you something real to cry about.”
It’s amazing what you can learn to keep inside.
A day later, lying more or less in the sofa with my head bleary and aching with hunger and my throat scratchy with dehydration, I realize that those blank notebook pages are the answer. I can’t get the burned notebooks back—that was, after all, why I had burned them—but I can fill these leftover pages with memories of what I might have written in them.
I can construct some kind of a record, though it will be one very filtered by the passage of time.
And the important memory might be in there somewhere. If I am lucky.
And brave.
It would be so much easier just to fade away.
Erase, erase.
So much easier to stop pretending my existence matters and let go. Then it will be over. Then I won’t have to keep existing after I do this thing. This thing I don’t even want to do. It’s not the idea of drifting into nothingness afterwards that bothers me. It’s the terrible fear that instead, I might hook myself back into the universe somehow. Re-assert my reality.
Get stuck being real.
I joined a cult in college. That much, I know. Like a story told sketchily over a cup of coffee, but without the context or detail because it’s an embarrassing story and nobody wants to think about it too hard. The person telling it is embarrassed to have been there, and the person hearing it is reflecting embarrassment as well.
I joined a cult in college. I really craved the love-bombing, because I had never in my life felt really loved. I didn’t know how to receive attention in smaller doses, at lower proof. I had so much armor on it took weaponized love to get through.
I joined a cult in college. It was a dumb idea and it was weird while it lasted—it lasted long past college, it lasted eight whole years—and I was in love with one of the guys that ran it.
I joined a cult in college. One of the guys who ran it… I thought he was my boyfriend. He wasn’t, though. He was preying on me. Grooming me.
I did not have a lot of agency in the relationship.
He’s one of the cult’s leaders now.
The pen ran out of ink, and then I had to figure out how to fill it when I also couldn’t touch most of my ink bottles. My hand just swiped through them, all the gorgeous little art objects full of brilliant colors. I groped back in the shelf, waving blindly…
My fingers brushed something squat and cool. I pulled it out, and the bottles that had been in front of it slid out of the way, clattering. Not of my unreal hand. But of the ink, the thing that was real. The thing that mattered.
One or two fell to the floor. Ink bottles are sturdy, though, and the carpet kept them from breaking.
The bottle I could touch was a bottle of Parker Quink, blue-black. It was two-thirds empty. The label stained.
An old and trusty friend.
I filled my pen.
He threw me down the stairs by my hair one time.
My stepfather, I mean.
Not Joshua.
I’d forgotten that. Erased it. And now I can’t unremember it again.
A funny thing happens as I write.
I feel myself getting more real. I figure it out when I realize that I can lean an elbow on the table I am resting the current mostly-finished notebook on. That’s a relief; you have no idea how hard writing is when you can manage to hold a pen but not rest your hand on anything.
When I realize that I could touch things, I stopped writing and ran into the kitchen, terrified of missing my window.
I still can’t lift a glass, but I manage to elbow the faucet on after a few minutes of trying. I bend my head sideways and drink from the thin cold trickle of stale-tasting water. Nothing ever felt better flowing down my throat. I gulp, gulp again. Manage to get it to pool in my hands and drink in that slightly more civilized fashion.
I drink until my stomach hurts, and then go to make sure the toilet seat is up, just in case I turn immaterial again before the stuff works its way through my system. Dehydrated as I had been that might take a while, but I have learned to plan ahead. Such are the important life concerns of the terminally ghostly.
I sit on the bathroom floor and rest the back of my head against the sliding glass door of the shower. At least I am not falling through walls or floors. Yet?
I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can stop, and it will be miserable… but I will die of thirst in a few days. If I stop clutching at making myself real. If I just accept that I am not important, and let my ridiculous scribblings go.
It sounds so appealing. A final erasure.
And I won’t have to remember…
I won’t have to remember the horrible person I had been. The horrible things I had done. The horrible things that had happened to me. I could forget them all.
Who knows? Maybe if I forget them thoroughly enough—if I encourage myself to forget them thoroughly enough—I won’t even die. I’ll just fade.
Maybe if I fade enough I won’t have material needs like food, water, air anymore. I’ll be a ghost for real.
I’ll be free. Free of myself. Free of pain.
I have these notebooks here.
I’m probably real enough to burn them now. Right now.
It will just cost the lives of some people I have never heard of to get there.
How many people?