Memory-235 (Short Story?)

There is a memory that slumbers in everyone, until it crawls out of their head. 

It always kills someone, sometimes not for years. But it does.

Memory does that to you. 

That memory exists at all is a miracle. A million major events, ten billion tiny events, and that dance of biology and creation so broken some call it God have to all come crashing, thundering, imploding into one slice of a moment that burns its way into the neurons of a little thing, and fwah it is… buoyed… through time; cradled in the arms of this creature until one day it bursts behind their eyes. 

White 

phosphorous 

re-beginning. 

What other thing in this world gets such a certain re-birth? 

What other thing in this world gets such an unflinching second chance? 

I can feel the blazing, nuclear heat of the memory roaring against my retinas. I can feel it pushing them forward until they bulge - brown honey against crimson sky. 

A white phosphorus re-beginning… at the cost of the present. 

The law of energy applies even to memory. Nothing can take another thing’s place without making space. And nothing can be truly banished without being replaced. It’s easy enough to imagine life shifting and changing, flowing to fill holes where they’re made by or appear with loss. But it is a natural behaviour, and therefore it is brutal. The baby robin is pushed from the nest to make room for the cuckoo chick. Certain life is secured by certain death. There is no other substitute - each exchange must be equivalent. 

And so The Memory is never truly banished because nothing can ever be its equal. 

I can feel it in my palms. Isn’t that strange? It’s burning the sinews that I’ve spent years of my life training to type and draw, pick and stroke, grip and claw. These are my hands as they are now. 

But memory by definition belongs anywhere but now. 

It’s like someone is shining a torch through my palms. 

Or… no, they look fine. 

When did they get this big? 

When did my hands grow into me? 

I can feel the radioactive fingers slipping beneath the flesh of my eye, hooking onto the lip of my socket with a blazing ferocity as the thing it is attached to begins to roil in waves, breaking itself again and again at the breaker of my nasal cavity. I feel my hair fall away and my teeth fall out. My skeleton, the brother to this memory, who kept the mind safe and carried it through the years with me, turns to molten dust as I look skyward. 

I am outside the grocery store, where the scent hit my nose, where I felt the memory. 

It is awake, and the present is gone. 

Perhaps I am. 

I’m not sure either of us will return. 

Memory does that to you. 

 

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