The Art of Forgetting

by Don Norum

I shut my eyes and see your face. 

My memX brings you back not just as a vibrant swirl of sunlit laughter, but the shiver at my fingertips as they brush the short hairs on your neck, the indignant flaring of your nose at the ghost of uncle-gifted aftershave. 

A blind man claimed that to think is to forget. I wonder if that was self-delusion or denial—concluding that the dark was right, because his candle couldn’t last the night. 

I still have you here inside my head. 

I remember when you last sang me moon-struck, words flowing from your tongue past the gentle swell of your lips as the breath in your chest rose and fell against mine, two souls sat together in a seat meant for one, like the sun and earth sewn together. Each soft syllable sent a shiver across my scalp, shaved and Sharpie-marked. 

The half-hitch in your throat and the way your eyes would shy away from mine, where once they’d settled in—they told me what I knew you couldn’t bear to say. The question that you wouldn’t ask, I answered: I was sure. The moments of perfection were worth all the weight of years—I learned this from loving you—but memories of moments fade, and that you taught me too. 

I shut my eyes and wake up in the past. 

A rapier pins my heart between its beats with the soap-and-lilies smell of your shampoo and the dusty soul-stuff of antique books suffusing the stitches of your sweater, as you pull it on and grin with glasses all askew. Your laugh washes past my ears like falling waves, as soft as the beating wings of wild ducks; the golden, gossamer fleece of your shower-wet hair glows like cobwebs on an August morning. 

You smell of honeysuckle and moon flowers as you kiss me quite insane, the honey-dewed milk of paradise upon my lips. 

I lose another hour within my cage of memories. Platinum electrodes pin the horseshoe ounce of moistware to the bottom of my hippocampus and grant me passage to an Elysium of engrams, a lifetime ticket for an inward emigration to better days gone by. 

To have lived another's life comes at a heavy cost. Far cheaper—but still dear—to craft a single perfect moment and set it like a jewel within your mind. To steal my dreams past ivory gates and send them back through polished horn could well have cost my soul, but still... 

I might have made you up inside my head. 

I lost you like a fortune, slowly and then all at once—small slights and changes tallied up each day until they finally broke through. If I had known to tell you, I could have let you know: how much I loved the way you curled your voice around a joke and pronounced the brackets round a quote, or how you'd rub the right side of your nose. How well-spent I thought our flustered hour, looking for lost keys together. But how would I have known until after you had left and all those things were past? 

And but so then you had gone, and there was nothing I could say, and no one to say it to. 

I cannot find the look you gave me as we stood barefoot in the sand and watched the sun burst from the waters phoenix-bright. A ginkgo leaf of fusion fire, sung by cold winds into flight, its stem reflected, rippling, dancing in the bay's green swells. I thought of how your eyes blazed like meteors, to behold that blinding sight, fierce tears seeping forth and trailing down your cheeks. 

But I recall the thought as words, a pale outline of a shadow past. 

I pressed delete and cried as I confirmed. 

I shut my eyes and watch you go away. 

I thought I loved you, but when you left and I woke up, I did not break down weeping. I poured black coffee and burnt a bagel and made sure you'd taken all your things—toothbrush, the cable for your phone, the books stacked beside your side of the bed—and then I went to work. 

My memX followed dependency chains of cause-effect and consequence, link by painful link, to prise them loose and free me from the anchor of the past. The empty space inside my head, the hole within my heart—those hurt, but not for long; I slept and it defragged my mind. 

Emotions backpropagate until we behold a world woven from within ourselves, neurons settling on those scattered sense impressions that might could have been the ones to once make us feel that way, but weren’t and never were, and so we call them dreams. Some nights I think I dreamt of you, although without your face or voice or breath or touch it’s quite impossible to tell. 

I wonder if you're truly gone, and if you ever were. I take your name and try to find your family, your friends, your face or faintest ghost, to search for the smallest trace in silicon of what might once have cast the shadows now faded from my mind. 

I seek but do not find. 

You might have lived with me within this vale of tears, made dry and warm with love and care and other hollow words. You might have been so real here that you were you and were with me and the two of us were all there ever was, but now... 

I think I made you up inside my head. 

I forget your name (though there's long since been no one behind it), and if I still stumble when my morning eyes first see the sun, or can’t remember why I weep when I hear some pretty girl sing the blues, that's just the price I'll have to pay. 

I shut my eyes and can no longer see your face. 

I must have made you up inside my head.