Edited by: Antara Joshi
“This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.”
“I know.”
“What do we do?”
“Enjoy it.”
I remember the final night so vividly because I have turned the memory over and over in my mind so many times and put it down on paper even more times. Our friendship began with me asking you to watch my favourite film and it ended just the way the film did. I was so angry at you after what happened happened. I also wanted to erase all the memories with any trace of you. But there are so many. Would I be left a person without them all? Even after you left, I thought of you. I notice your absence sometimes, and that still feels like your presence. Would you erase all the memories if you could?
Three days ago, I watched my phone ring with a call from you and waited until it disconnected. I stared at the screen and it took everything in me to not pick up. It has been a year. Remember, remember, remember what he did, I kept telling myself. I kept telling myself to remember when I had tried so hard to forget a year ago. When the ending of our friendship had begun, I had asked you the same question that Clementine asked Joel, and you gave me the same answer. Enjoy it, while it lasts, you said, while drawing blood from me. Did you see that you were drawing blood?
“I can’t remember anything without you.”
I write from my melancholia and so, you taint everything I write. I write about the end more times than I write about the beginning because the beginning was good and loving and beautiful. People seem to find it so easy to hold onto the last worst thing someone did to them and forget all the good and yet, it has never worked like that for me. I would like to forget the night you first put your head in my lap, that time you held me while I cried about someone else and all the late-night walks and the early-morning cigarettes. I can’t forget any of it— they flash through my mind in crystal clear detail every time a minor reminder of you comes into my field of vision. So, I write about the final memory more times than I write about you shyly asking if you could hold my hand because this is the only way I keep the details from getting fuzzy. It is still easier to recall your eyes when they had love for me in them than when they were frowned in anger towards me.
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
I would rather my memories of your hands, your black t-shirt’s fabric between my fingers, your laugh, your silhouette, fade out. But they don’t. They stay. They stay because I did what you told me to. I enjoyed it all while it lasted. The memory of your final act of leaving is blurry, both because my vision was too, then and because I could not bring myself to enjoy even the poetic irony of it all— of being stabbed by the one you handed the knife to. My eyes blurred so that I wouldn’t destroy myself watching you not turn back to look at me from the door this time. I still sharpen every detail of this painful memory, because it is all I have that keeps me from letting you into my room again. I push my mind to unblur every second of it— think about the lump I felt in my throat, being frozen, unable to speak, the harsh sound of the zipper of my dress being pulled down, the bruises on my hips, how my nails dug into your arm leaving a line of crescent moons, the black and white spots in my vision, the pain, the excruciating pain. It was the first time I couldn’t enjoy a memory with you while it lasted. I couldn’t. And I tried to, for so long after.
“Come back and make up a goodbye, at least. Let’s pretend we had one.”
So often I wish it didn’t end in flames. I dream up gentler ways we could’ve untangled ourselves from each other’s lives. We live our lives as parallel lines, sometimes looking over. In these fantasies, I still have old scars but you don’t give me new ones as you leave. I think about Clementine so desperately begging Joel for a proper goodbye and I’m almost grateful that you left without a warning because I would’ve begged too. Your cowardice saved the last inch of my dignity. I wish I hadn’t lavished so much of it on you before.
“It would be different, if we could just give it another go-round.”
“Remember me. Try your best; maybe we can.”
Despite it all, I wished you peace after the final night. I told myself the pain was all the closure I needed and I chanted this thought like a prayer until it was engraved on the insides of my skull. I wished you everything you were undeserving of and I wished it for you and whoever else’s life and body you might touch. When the bruises from that night started to fade, I started wondering if I had hallucinated all of it. I have nothing of you. How do I trust my memory to hold the intricacies of the good and the bad, and all the spaces in between?
“Please let me keep this memory, just this one.”
Now I have a new lover and I keep asking him to watch my favourite film so that I can replace the memory of you. Will it still be a memory of you?