So.
I admit it, I have a drug problem. I’m in need of rehab and hopefully with some help from three of my closest friends, I’ll be on a narrow yet straightforward path to recovery. My name is James and I’m a memory-junkie.
I think it’s a rather common ailment, being overly fond of remembering. I know that you’ve lost many hours reminiscing about your championship Speech season in high school or that time you spent five days in L.A County jail. I’m possibly just a tad worse than you. Probably because of you.
There are support groups (I’ve seen flyers) and shelves with a small black “Memory Addiction” label in Self-Help sections. The books have titles like, Letting Go Of the Past, Living the Present, Seven Steps to Conquering Memory Dependence and Chicken Soup for the Hindsight-Loving Soul.
I think that sexist pig Dr. Phil even did a primetime special on it once, where he shouted at meek people sitting on stools that they needed to wake up, get their heads out of the clouds and “live ‘yer gosh-darned lives, people!” Most of the guests on the show exhibited mild symptoms of addiction: one wispy-voiced woman from Boston declared that she spent at least three hours a day thinking about the past. Another man who sat on the edge of the stage, dressed in a one-size too small blue suit, confessed to reliving a certain moment in his life (when he and his son ran off the road on a snowy day in small-town Colorado, and his son’s soaring, unbelted body floated out the front windshield) in his mind every hour on the hour. The audience shared a gasp. I shut the television off. If I went on the show, I wonder what the caption under my talking head would read.
James, 23, Addicted to memories of Ryan, his former best friend and lover.
James, 23, Childish insomniac obsessed with his self-proclaimed abandonment
James, 23, Junkie-punk for the gifts proffered by recollection.
It’s you that I’m addicted to, those vivid moments of us. Some nights have passed since you said “Shazam!” and slammed the door. Fifty-five, to be pinpoint-accurate. A stunning disappearing act. Three years of friendship and six months of maybe-more, evaporated, in a single one-way conversation. One of the moments I replay the most is when you said with such sincerity,
“James, I don’t want you to be the one I end up with.”
Then, looking down to the coffee table, you picked up one of the 500 pieces of a jigsaw puzzle we’d been working on and snapped it into place. The downtown Los Angeles skyline was almost complete. We could see it right outside our window but you insisted that we needed our own, to have in our home. You stared at the puzzle, then at me.
“I don’t want to hurt you. But--”
Just another piece to snap in.
The puzzle still sits unfinished, towers are missing their mid-section and the “ -S B---K” logo begs completion. I imagined ripping it apart one Sunday afternoon, in an act of dramatic flair, flinging little colored cardboard shapes at the wall and across the room. They’d lay strewn about the carpet until one day I’d get tired of the messy reminder and decide to pick them up and try to piece it all back together. Instead, I sat on the couch and wafted away into recollections of your singularity. Like the way your eyebrow arches or the sensation of stubble scratches.
That’s why I’m seeking help, the heaviness in my chest has to be dissolved. No more sinking into retold stories with every scent that recalls you or every song we listened to together. Whether it’s when I’m awake at work, or tentatively asleep, I keep returning to the summers we spent together or being visited by that time I took you home for Thanksgiving, we got drunk with my mom, and then after all were asleep, we drove out to the creek near my house and fucked in my car (as if we were in high school). It’s like watching a television network in which every episode, of every series is only scenes of “Previously on...” I’m in deep need of something to ease the exit-flow of you.
In search of a solution, I go to The Girls, the trio that lives below us in our building. Some say they’re secretly Southland sorcerers. To me, they’re just The Girls.
Ariana, Alexandra and Linda seat themselves on the floor in the bedroom of their hard-to-find apartment (some say it’s enchanted). They gather in a circle around an indigo hookah inscribed with archaic symbols. White hoses wrap around the ladies’ wrists while sweet smoke drapes the room. A nightly ritual of sharing stories. I join them and pour out my problem, asking for any assistance they can offer.
Ariana, with the smile of a loving mother and fierce tongue like a glowing firebrand, arranges an evening out. She whisks me to a West Hollywood bar, where the cover charge is a piece of your soul. She whips her tongue and chocolate tresses at the bouncer and we don’t pay. We’re here on serious business.
“We’re going to cleanse your mind and body of Ryan, by filling it with someone new.”
She makes drinks appear and we set sail for the night. The sweaty, well-sculpted boys banging their bodies to the choppy beats, flashing lights and awkward eye contact with strangers, all taste like times shared with you. I try to wash it away with more alcohol. After six pretty poisons, Ariana has appropriately vanished and I’m at home, unmaking a bed with another man. My first since you. My first other than you.
It’s sloppy and he feels like an uncomfortable sweater. The lamp on my desk somehow remains on and I watch every second unwind. I’m quickly bored by the casual encounter. There’s nothing at stake.
As this blonde-haired baby face (I think his name is Peter, but could possibly be Nathaniel) attempts to make me forget, I collapse time like a cardboard box and remember the first time you put your hands where his are, in this bed.
A lavish musical played on the television and you whisper-sang the lyrics into my neck and mouth. Your fingers dipped into me and I snapped softly into your body. In the whirling crescendos of the finale, my back lifted from the bed.
You said, “You’re adorable.”
Peter/Nathaniel says “So, are we finished?”
Linda, whose hair curls and unfurls in beautiful, bushy nutmeg waves, offers me her gift next. The dreamer of the trio, she likes knitting, making greeting cards, vacuuming and smoking pot. She tells me about her own struggle with moving beyond memories. She weaves a tale of her Boy, the one she loved since she was six, and his brother who returned what he figured was her misdirected affection. And she tells me about her Boy’s whiplash passing into those furthest fields. I imagine what I would feel if you weren’t only a freeway stretch away.
She pulls a palm-size lavender case from her pocket and clicks it open. She removes a small, slender pipe whose colors are a mottled purple, blue and white. It catches the sunlight sneaking in and the colors start to shift and whirl, resembling nighttime waves washing up and down the stem and around the bowl.
“This is Talula. She has a way about her.”
She packs the yawning bowl with green from a glass jar she keeps among the spices. She hands Talula to me.
“She’ll help you.”
A flickering torch and a deep, burning breath. Then another and another. Linda lets Talula teach me how to feel differently. The haze descends and I become much more aware of my blinking. Linda asks me to talk about Ryan. The words surge and ebb, stories arriving in fragments, amidst giggles. I unleash it all, feeling free to emote fully and experience the ache once again. As Talula comes back to me for a final round, I find myself absorbed in her watery complexion. I’m transported back to the December when the Southland flooded due to Noah-size rains. We walked home in the downpour under a dusky sky. Sharing a cigarette, kicking puddles at each other and swinging on lampposts. Los Angeles was transformed into Southland moors, and I wandered the wet kingdom with you, a kinder Heathcliff. Inseparable. Talula brings me back to those Heights.
When I return to Linda’s bedroom, my cheeks are moistened, my head is light and I’m starving. Yet I still feel the heavy in my chest. I smile and thank Linda. She hopes Alexandra can help.
Alexandra, a goddess of hookah, her raven hair is streaked with dark blue, an evening ocean resting around her shoulders. She speaks the least out of the three. Her smile is a rare artifact and her mystique, legendary.
She takes me into the kitchen and extends her hand, palm-up. A round sky-blue pill sits in the center of her palm. A star is carved onto its diminutive face.
“This is powerful magic, friend. Pure joy. It’ll burn away your blues. Swallow.”
Down it goes, chased by orange soda. Alexandra sends me home to my couch. Before I can reach it, I find myself in my hallway, standing in front of a mirror. And I’m beautiful. I look the same yet all those weighty insecurities, especially the ones you left me with, seem to drip away like candle wax. I’m no longer a large-nosed geek with poor skin. I’m a shining warrior, a superhero of the Southland with wide, pretty eyes. I run my hand over my bare arm, and my nerves excite and explode. The bare walls of my apartment are suddenly smooth partitions of snow. Eyes closed and still the feelings of fervent peace spark in my stomach. Head down and still electric pleasure-worms glide throughout my body.
Without knowing it, I’m transporting this present ecstasy to the past, to the previous Halloween, when you dressed as a boy of the Gothic persuasion and I as Peter Pan. Black make-up, your lack of a shirt and flat stomach, black jeans with a shining silver belt buckle in the shape of a skull. I see you so clearly. That night you took me to my first rave. I remember holding your hand, feeling at home, as we walked into the arena, the pulsing cornucopia of lights, costumes and bass overwhelming my senses. You intertwined your fingers in mine, squeezed and took a breath.
“I can see this as Heaven.”
And we stood together, the closest I ever came to religious experience.
I wake up, 36 hours after taking Alexandra’s tablet, and the heaviness lingers, even stronger now. The Girls have no more magic to offer. Maybe you’ll always make me feel this way.
A knock at the door. A single, square box sits on my doorstep, with no return address or delivery boy. A plain wooden crate, actually, with a crimson ‘FRAGILE’ sprayed on to its top. I wasn’t expecting any ominous boxes in the post today. Inside the apartment, I pry it open with shaky fingers and a butter knife.
Bottles. Rows and rows of green bottles, corked and unlabeled. Too big for beer and necks too short for wine. A loose piece of ripped notebook paper is taped near the top. It reads in neat, blue ink,
“[bottle it]”
I pull a bottle out and find that it’s empty. In place of a label is an engraving. The inscription reads:
In each bottle, right upon the last,
blow a memory.
Right into the green pristine,
label long peeled
and sit it upon the shelf.
It’s not the strangest item I’ve ever received on my doorstep. I look out the window. Nothing. I uncork a bottle and it the sound is a pop, hollow and deep.
I bring it to my lips and blow.
A stream of blue-tinted smoke leaves my lips and flows down into the neck and base of the bottle. It coils and whirls, dancing like a buoyant snake in the green chamber. When my breath runs out, a feathery calm comes over me. I feel lighter, as if gravity suddenly forgot a few of my atoms existed. I cork the bottle and set it on the bar, the one you built me for my 21st birthday. I watch the smoke swirl and suddenly begin to stick to the sides of its container, condensing. Moisture begins to form by the second and within minutes, the bottle is full of liquid. I stare into the bottle and in the green-tinted fluid, images sharpen and fade. I catch a glimpse of my car, a creek, a fluttering of wings, your mischievous smile and my hand on your bare chest. Pieces of a story I once knew.
I grab another bottle and blow.
Soon, the bar is full. I’ve nearly emptied the entire wooden crate of bottles. The heaviness in my chest has diminished. I sit and stare at the glittering jade light dancing on the unpainted walls. Each bottle is bright with a bed-lived Sunday, or a rain-drenched Santa Monica kiss, or that first time you put your head on my shoulder and closed your eyes. I didn’t think my chest could ever feel so full.
I pick up the last bottle and blow. This time the smoke is sparkling white. I cork it and attempt to examine the contents as it liquefies.
Sharp-teethed butterflies attack my gut. I know this one too well. This one is too tempting. I reach under the bar, grab a glass and pour out the memory, in a glowing stream. A moment’s hesitation. And then…
A shot that goes down like goose feathers.
Standing bare chest beside a mirror, you teach me the trick of the shave, an art of masculinity I never learned. There’s no sound in the bathroom but our breathing and a wet razor, being dipped and tapped. I watch you in the reflection, capturing your gaze and then releasing it. You begin sliding the silver, the metal cool on crisp hair, slick slick cut and crisscross my cheek. Your hand on my hand, held--breathe, one, two. The razor glides down my chin, greeting my neck. On my back I feel the beat of your heart, playing bass to my increasingly-rapid melody. Those thick brown arms (seems like seven of them) hold me from behind, on my cheek, waist and bare stomach. You slide the sharpness along the lines of my face. The face I know is not good enough. The face you’ll forfeit. And soon, my freshly shorn cheek is on yours, slowly grazed, lips parted…soft, sensitive and safe.
I could drink that one for days.
I’m shivering as I grab one of the bottles and fling it against the wall, letting it explode, a poof of smoke erupting then dissipating. I should shatter each bottle, eradicate you from my life, and breathe in all our time together as it dissipates like a hookah goddess’ asphyxiating whisper. No. I should drink myself to death, be blissfully inebriated while letting my liver choke on liquid reliving.
No. I’ll linger in this room, bound only by past whispers and breaths, leaving each bottle intact, each bottle alive, and let it all remain passed away, corked and shelved.