Memory Alone
by Aspen Taylor
photo by Olivia Smith
The sky cannot decide whether to snow or rain and the blur between the two feels like the rift between the two worlds. Our existences split apart—a dry, ordinary sort of living, and another iridescent realm that hovers slightly above our skin. It electrifies the soft of our hair, reverberates among the atoms to create a heat like an original star. The dewy sensations of the air today—knife-bright raindrops with a bite of snow—thrust me backward into a memory. It’s as if I have peered into the wet, distorted images of the raindrops and by some cruel, necessary mistake, have fallen in, irredeemably. In the memory, I am back less than a month ago, in early winter, when we inhaled something faintly sweet into our young lungs and blew it out into the dark river of the night, watching the smoke coil like a white question, then dissolve into the cold wind. I am there, sitting upon that window ledge, cool against my bottom, beside the flushed summer roses of her cheeks. There is a pulse in the black, wordless eyes of her face, as her lids lie dreamily over the plains of her cheeks, as she says, in some smooth, relaxed language touched by a subliminal light—“now this is a vibe.”
A vibe— how can such a vague noun embody the rippling we have entered: the neon lights which adorn the upper corners of the room flicker and beat lucidly in coming waves as the room began to mutate into something unsure, something surreal. We sat and spoke in our laughter as luscious as daybreak, our limbs loose and light when the shiver poured open, like an impulse, over the deranged length of my spine and I began to merge with that hovering that is always there, that rift of living and non-living. A deathless sort of dying, an inhale, a glitter, an exhale, a pupil. Thoughts disintegrate and I lurch to grab onto the arm of the girl whose face full of roses, has now lost all its color. I think it hit, I said, and I shiver, sweat, melt. She takes my wet hand and together we lie on the bean-bag in the center of the floor. All of the lights, real and unreal, make a new, hot sort of sense. It’s a delirium—just breathe in and out. In and out.
I love you. I love you. I love you. In this state, it is the mantra I repeat over and over. Love claws and moans. I inhale it, quell the hunger in my throat, still the acid of my saliva. Who could call this a vibe when it’s a chasm: love, distilled, though elusive, trailing like a comet in the lights, real and unreal. Above. Hovering.
And now: a memory within a memory. Lying there with human flesh melting in my palm, another ache resurrected. I have known of hovering before. It is not simply awakening—it is loss. This seems to always happen, these incidents, the mania, when I am beside those whom I am unsure I love. I long to love them—it is desperate, a luminous and fleeting hunger for their touch, their touch. Who can reach into a chest and finger the blood where warmth remains? Who can invert fluidity so that I may feel it with my own fingertips? Instead, I feel I am always beside absent, winglike bodies animated with dry laughter and heavy eyes. Always I try to lure the love from their mouths—I try to feel whatever that hovering is, that unknown and lovely place that sizzles just above our skin.
The memory within my memory thrusts me from early winter into deep summer. I had been at a party in a basement with some faces I knew. I left feeling loveless and confused and ended up on a bed with two girls I had known since childhood, who I came to understand less and less. Being with them was like holding a knife to my own throat, glinting rainlike with the mirror image of my own incessant sorrow. While they inhaled something pure white, I looked on their lips for evidence of all the lips they had kissed. I looked long for the memory of love that touched them in so close a moment. I was furious to know that somewhere in their memories they had kissed someone they believed they loved—to have that falsity glimmer against them, like spit. I had hardly spoken while there. I had sulked. I had played with a lighter, its orange light against my thigh. All I thought was whatever I touch I lose. Whoever I am I lost that years ago.
And that same night, on that bed from childhood, with the dark, warm air swelling outside, I inhaled something and leapt into a new plane of existence. I cried and threw up on the carpet; I quivered, sighed, and said the same old mantra, the one that would haunt me again and again in the sober hours — I love you, I love you, I love you. As I uttered those wild, ceaseless words, I couldn’t feel my face, my head. I had dissolved into summer air, nimble and nonexistent. I came to realize that I love most fervently when I cannot feel its burn, its matter, when even the features of my own flesh are impalpable.
Later that night, after I had returned home to my own childhood bedroom, I woke in the middle of the night and wrote in my journal THIS IS NOT ME.
And in the sober dark I looked up and saw all the faces who left me this bankrupt. Their frayed, absent faces unquenchable. I see the thread that will lead me to the future, to that smoking winter room, to the false loves, to this day, now, of rain and snow, an indecisive sky. Who can reach into the rain and decipher its substance? Who can reach into the snow and keep it forever? In that summer bedroom, I held the opaline forearm of my childhood friend and felt my mouth water for her. In that lighted winter room I held the hand of a girl I had not known long and I felt the familiar water. Sorry, sorry, I had also said because that’s always what I say in the face of love. When it just burns too much against an arm, when it levitates, incomprehensible, in the weeping air. The highest highs, iridescently burning.
It is all just an excuse to love a little openly—why we inhale these blue chemicals into our lungs, though it scalds against the entrance. Peel open a wrist and find eternity. See the cosmos rush down her face where once the roses had lain. In the morning after all this, I will place my hand on your empty shoulder. I will say, I’m sorry about all this and cough a little. And when you do not face me, I will pull on your shoulder, pull and pull until your neck pivots, and I see your face as my own. It rains and snows, my face, an elemental indecision lusting for a moment’s tenderness. Okay, so this is just how it goes. We try to do it all at once because that’s the only way to escape the nothingness. We would throw in a little sunshine if it were possible, but technically speaking, it's not. All we’ve got is this cool, drenching beauty, enough to freeze a lifeform. It will be years before I know it is too cold to sustain life here. Not everyone cares to warm themselves on memory alone.