[Original Novel] The Background of Your Memories, Part 2

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“Remember how after the breakup, I just kind of floated around? Unsure what to do with my life, since I’d planned my future around the assumption that we’d still be together? The wanderings of a lost child.” She looked mildly uncomfortable, but nodded.

“I remember thinking to myself, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Over and over. I’ve never handled change very well. Small ones, sure. Incremental. But when something upsets my life in a big way, it’s a different story. Every time I realized I was spinning my wheels but going nowhere and tried to do something about it, some deep-seated part of me fought every effort to change course.

Like it didn’t get the memo. It had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the smoldering debris of Plan A, and then only after prying its fingers loose one by one. I read something once about how the brain, like the rest of our bodies, evolved to conserve calories.

So it resists any sudden, drastic restructuring, falling back on what we today recognize as cognitive biases in order to avoid it. The proverbial old dog which can’t learn new tricks. But if it were only that, I don’t think it would’ve been so difficult to put my life back together.”

She shifted in her seat and looked about ready to interject, but I carried on. “Having done that once after the breakup, I thought nothing could catch me so completely off guard ever again. Not to the point where I flat out stop understanding life and my place in it.

I’ve been through a lot of hard times. You were there for some of them, I don’t have to tell you what it was like. But until you left, nothing else was able to fuck me up so badly that I didn’t know how to continue. Just flesh wounds. Dented but not destroyed.

When you go through an emotional apocalypse like that and come out the other side in one piece, a lot of fears leave you. Discovering that you can survive being totally destroyed like that, broken down to the tiniest, most fundamental pieces but still regenerate, inspires a sort of false confidence that nothing can ever hurt you again.

I think like most people, I have a narrative in my head about my life in which I’m the protagonist on some sort of quest. We start thinking about our own lives that way before we’re even old enough to be self aware about it. Humans are storytellers, it’s how we propagated knowledge before writing.

So when bad things happen, part of how we cope is to frame those events as pitfalls on our quest. Setbacks that the hero will overcome and be stronger for it. That usually works too, for small things. Losing your home, spending the night in jail...a breakup…”

I’d meant to stop bringing that up, but it slipped out. Sarah looked away, but kept listening. “But there are some things that doesn’t work for” I stipulated. “Really hard, cold, difficult shit where the narrative breaks down. Rape...miscarriage...the death of a loved one. Life suddenly stops being a story. As if the stage is dismantled, the curtains ripped away to reveal a bare brick wall behind the set. Life as it truly is.

I’m not going to be okay. I know it hasn’t been long enough to say that for sure, but this feels totally different from...you know. I just feel fucked up and broken inside. I feel like glass shards, thorns and poison. I can’t see a way of coming back from this.”

Bless her heart, she said exactly what I would have if our places were reversed. “I know you. When you’re hurt, you turn inward, retreating from the world. Sinking further and further into yourself. It’s fine to find temporary refuge there, but there is no permanent escape in that direction. If you travel down that path far enough, the only thing at the end is death.

If you let this kill you, it will only compound the tragedy. If they knew you survived the crash, don’t you think they’d be relieved? Don’t you think they devoted most of their adult lives to nurturing you, to shaping what sort of person you’d grow into? Now you’re going to throw all of that into a fire?”

I glanced around the room. Mercifully, because it was so early, the place was desolate. The only other customer present huddled over a laptop at the far end of the room with headphones on. If any of this disturbed him, or if he could even hear it, he gave no indication.

When I didn’t say anything for a while, she nudged a small coffee across the table. “I don’t drink coffee, but figured I should buy something if I was going to hang out here for any length of time.” I took it, savoring the warmth radiating into the cold, stiff joints of my hands.

“Yanno, you were always like this. Never wanted to ask for help with anything, even when it was obvious to me that you needed it. If you forget everything else I’ve said, at least remember that much. You shouldn’t try to bear all of this yourself.

I can’t be the only one worried about you. I can’t be the only one who has reached out to you. Take hold of those hands and let them pull you out of the pit you’re in, or else it will become your grave.” Unusually blunt by her standards. I expected her to steer me away from suicidal ideation, not rub my nose in it.

I got her off my case by promising that I’d start checking my messages, and touch base with her later in the week. When I returned to the shed, the lingering caffeine buzz prevented me from just crawling back into the cot and passing out like usual. As intended I suppose, though the run-in with Sarah left me feeling unexpectedly drained.

Weary but unable to sleep, I sat cross-legged on my cot, wrapped the blanket around myself and went back to watching tapes. This one turned out to be from a picnic. I vaguely remembered bits and pieces of it, but have never been sure whether they were genuine memories or something I dreamt.

What a surreal sensation to witness the basis for those faded, distorted memories playing out before me, filling in the gaps. I looked about five, playing in the grass at a local park as my parents poured themselves some wine.

When I looked troubled, Mom asked me what was the matter. I’d pulled up the edge of some tough black fabric commonly used in landscaping as a weed barrier. “The ground shouldn’t be made out of cloth” I muttered. She seemed tickled by it and asked what it should be made out of. “It should be made out of...ground. Shouldn’t it?”

She made some remark to Dad about my curiosity, then asked me what it mattered whether the ground is made of cloth or dirt. I mulled it over, little brow furrowed deeply, before answering. “It makes the difference of...whether anything I do or say matters at all. Whether the world is real, or fake.”

They had a good long laugh over that. To them, the sort of cute, silly thing that often comes out of the mouths of children. But I remembered that part to this day only because of the impact it made on me. It was the moment when I first started to seriously contemplate such questions.

But there was something else. Something in the background of the video that I didn’t remember from that day. Distant enough that I might’ve missed it if I weren’t in the habit of watching the screen close up.

A dark figure, spectating the picnic from within a patch of tall grass. As I watched, it began to approach. Step by step it came, carefully parting the tall grass, then making its way towards the camera. That’s when I realized both Mom and Dad were in frame for the entire video. Who filmed this?

As it drew near I could make out more and more detail. A withered old man dressed in a black velvet uniform, the boots and gloves made of black vinyl and the belt needlessly wide. A small obsidian pin adorned his collar, the buttons fastening the garment shut made from highly polished silver.

The whole time, I wracked my brain for some explanation as to how this could be on an old home video. Did someone else find these tapes before I did? Copy their contents to a computer, edit this weird shit in, then put it back on the tape somehow? But there’d been no identifiable transition from the picnic to whatever was unfolding now. It was perfectly seamless.

The old man only stopped when he was but ten or so feet from the camera. A light wind whipped his sparse grey hair about. Then he spoke. “They’re from the background of your memories.” He fell silent for a moment after that. As if I was supposed to understand?

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}