And when she found something completely unbearable, she simply forgot it. That was her greatest power, forgetting. For nothing in the world can trouble you once it no longer exists, and what is the past but a selection of memories? Carefully edited and imbued with the light of forgotten summers. She had nearly drowned once, when she was six, or at least so people told her. She couldn’t remember it, however hard she tried. Only when her toes curled over the edge of the swimming pool did a faintness come over her, the afterglow of a forgotten fear.
It worked for people too. She had discovered this long ago, the delicate art of dismissal. The cutting out of a figure from one’s life, with neat precision and the edges sewn up so they would hardly be missed. She dreamt of them sometimes, and the shadows they had left behind, but you wouldn’t know it. She was awfully good at making things disappear.
December 2, 2011 17 Comments
fading
August 21, 2011 34 Comments
She considered the book, it’s dust jacket slightly ripped and cracked like the skin of some ancient beast. She considered it as one considers the distance between two rocks and whether they can leap over the rapids that swirl about the ankles or whether it is too far, and the threat of being pulled away and under too great. She had read it before, twice in a dozen years, and each time it had carved out of the emptiness some new need in her. It had made a bonfire of her world, and forced her to leap the dying ashes. Yet for all of that, she loved it. She loved it as the mayfly loves the setting sun, and like that brave creature she knew that the end is even more beautiful than the beginning, the last pages truer than the first. She ran a finger down it’s spine, the caress of a lover, lingering for a moment on the very edge, and like all lovers she parted with a whisper;
“Not just yet. Soon, but not yet.”
August 9, 2011 25 Comments