It feels like an accusation. Like I need to come up with an alibi, only I don't know what I'm being accused of. I don't know what it wants from me.
It's a thousand haunting memories scratching at the inside of my skull, raging to be written on paper and remembered. No, not even remembered.
Expelled.
Is it the things that happened, or the things I never got to say?
A bit of both. They're tangled. And that's why I'm struggling for that jump off. I don't know where one begins and the other ends.
What's the last thing you remember?
It's the sentence that thumps harder than anything else inside my head. And I don't know what it wants from me. It's like I've reached the end of a game of hopscotch without remembering where I started. Somehow I've arrived at a conclusion to a sentence whose intent I don't yet understand. And it's been holding me underwater for days.
A few days ago, I woke up with this sentence, this question in my head. Not a voice. Not a dream I was trying to remember. Just six words, already there, waiting for me to wake up.
I carried their weight all day. Eventually, I wrote them down. I thought perhaps if I put them on paper, they'd tell me what they wanted.
But nothing followed. Just silence.
And the next morning, there they were again.
What's the last thing you remember?
I'm listening to my son mixing chicken tenders with lemon pepper seasoning in the kitchen. A vampire movie, Blood Red Sky, on the television, and the echo of that sentence hovering between everything in the room.
I can feel the question. It's not just something happening in my head. I can feel all its movement, stirring inside me with both teeth and tenderness. Scratching when I'm not looking. And when I reach back, I know it's reaching for me.
It doesn't hurt. There's something almost comforting about the way it holds on. The cradling warmth of that bite.
But it won't let go.
Thousands of memories that want me to grab them by the hand and walk them out of this graveyard I can't seem to remember.
I try to feel something as I reach as far back as I can. I know they're there. Looking at me. Waiting for my hand. Patiently waiting. The air thick as fog with waiting.
And I wonder what they're doing there. Why can't I feel them? Why can't I recognize them? Am I supposed to remember them, or am I meant to let them go?
How do you let go of something you can't remember holding?
I keep reaching. And the farther I reach, the more the question folds back into itself.
What am I supposed to remember? What have I forgotten? What's the last thing I remember before I forgot? And how the fuck am I supposed to know what I've forgotten if I can't remember it?
It's almost maddening, trying to find the boundary of forgetting when whatever lies beyond it is precisely what I cannot remember.
I walk farther into the graveyard. There are no names I can read. No dates. Nothing to tell me who these figures are or why they're waiting.
Only the fog. And the hands. So many hands.
I want to take them all. I want to walk them out of this place, whatever this place is. I want to know why they've been waiting so patiently, why they haven't simply gnawed their way out.
But nothing. Words on paper and the weight of scrambling for an alibi.
We're all reaching for somebody. Nobody touching. And something about that feels familiar. Terribly familiar.
What makes this place a graveyard if nothing in it seems willing to stay dead?
I hadn't thought about that. What if these aren't things I've buried? What if they're things I've been trying to find?
I look at their faces, searching for something I recognize. Some expression. Some small flicker of knowing. Something that will tell me why I've come here.
But I can't remember.
What if the most frightening thing isn't what I might find, but that I might find nothing at all?
Nothing. After all this reaching. All this waiting. All these years.
And yet they're standing right in front of me. I know they're there. I can feel them. But I can't attach that feeling to anything.
Not a name. Not a face. Not a moment.
And then an errant thought. A small, almost accidental disturbance in the fog.
What if I don't recognize them because I've been looking for memories instead of myself?
Oh, fuck.
Maybe these aren't the ghosts of things I've forgotten. Maybe they're not memories at all.
Maybe they're me.
Every single one of them.
The little girl. The young woman. The mother. The lover. The woman who laughed until she couldn't breathe. The woman who cried when nobody was looking. The woman who kept going because there was nobody else to do it for her.
The woman who was loved. The woman who wasn't. The woman who stayed. The woman who left. The woman who survived.
And the woman who lived.
God, the woman who lived.
All of them standing in this graveyard, waiting for me to take their hands. And I couldn't remember them. Because I didn't recognize them. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped recognizing myself.
I've been walking through a graveyard full of ghosts, trying to remember who they belonged to. And all this time, they belonged to me.
No.
They were me.
And suddenly the question changes.
What's the last thing you remember?
Maybe it isn't asking me to remember an event. Maybe it's asking me to remember the last time I recognized myself without needing somebody else to tell me who I was.
Before the noise. Before the voices. Before I started believing everybody else's version of me. Before I forgot the sound of my own joy.
An auditorium of echoes.
All those voices, repeating themselves until I couldn't distinguish one from another. Until I couldn't hear myself.
And I wonder how much of what I've forgotten was ever really forgotten. How much was simply drowned out?
But there's something else. Something I almost missed.
I called this place a graveyard. I called them ghosts. Yet none of them have stopped reaching. None of them have stopped waiting.
And I didn't come here to bury them. I came here to take their hands. To walk them out. To bring them back among the living.
What if they aren't waiting to be rescued?
What if they're waiting to be witnessed?
I look back into the fog. They're still there. Patiently waiting.
And I begin to understand why the bite has never hurt. Why there was tenderness in the teeth. Why something kept scratching at me when I wasn't looking.
Perhaps I wasn't being haunted by something that wanted to hurt me. Perhaps I was being haunted by something that wanted me to look. To recognize. To remember.
And still, I hesitate.
Because what happens when I take the first hand? What happens to the others? Do they follow? Do they disappear? Do I have to remember every version of myself to know who I am now?
Or can I leave some of them standing in the fog without abandoning them?
I don't know. And perhaps I don't have to know. Not yet.
I reach for the nearest hand. And for a moment, I wonder whether she's been reaching for me all along. Whether she recognizes me even though I couldn't recognize her. Whether she remembers something I've forgotten.
And then I understand.
The question wasn't coming from somewhere in the fog. It wasn't being asked of me.
I was the one asking.
All this time, I've been standing in a graveyard full of myself, asking every woman I've ever been the same six words.
What's the last thing you remember?
And perhaps that's why there was so much noise in the silence after the question. Because I wasn't asking one woman. I was asking all of me.
I still don't know. The question hasn't gone anywhere. Neither has the graveyard. The air is still thick as fog with waiting.
And I just can't seem to remember what the last thing was that I couldn't remember.
But somewhere in that fog, a hand is reaching.
And this time, I know whose it is.
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