Month: April 2014

These memories aren’t mine.

I first remembered my sister three weeks ago, while sitting in my cubicle and moping over a mug of coffee. It came like a musty memory, sealed away in the crypt of my mind and only just resurfacing. I saw her toothy smile in my coffee, swirling in the black liquid with the hint of a laugh playing off it. Then I felt her grab my arm, yelling at me to not walk so slow, and I saw her eyes shine as she told me that she was engaged.

I don’t have a sister.

These ghosts, these whispers of a past long slipped between fingers — they’re not mine. Not my ghosts. And I don’t know why I remember them.

I’m a simple person; I live alone, have a cat, and I drink more coffee than I probably should. I have a mother in Florida who struggles to remember my name, and a father buried with the rest of my family in Virginia. I have no siblings, no children, no husband, no friends…so when I remembered my sister, a person who never existed, naturally I was alarmed.

At the time I brushed it off as a trick of the mind, a result of working on only three hours of sleep. I laughed at myself that night as I heated up instant noodles. Me? Have a sister? Sure, as a girl I had always begged my parents for a little sibling I could play with, but I think that after I was born they swore off the prospect of having more children. I never had a sister, and I was being delusional.

That was until I remembered my husband. I heard his voice first, a song in the back of my mind, and he was laughing, laughing at me. I felt a blush coming on, and I told him to quit teasing. He only laughed again, and then I saw his wallet lying on the counter, that pitiful, falling-apart piece of leather that he insisted on using despite me buying him newer, more expensive ones.

But I was never married. I never had a husband.

The next day I remembered my childhood friend, a long and lanky girl with buckteeth that were every dentist’s nightmare. I remembered growing up beside her, and I remembered her chasing me down the rows of chairs after high school graduation, her gown billowing and her cap flying out behind her. I remembered her crying as we parted for college, her cheeks smudged and black from running make-up. As I stood in the back of the bus on the way to work, I could still hear her crying.

Slowly, these memories took over my life.

They came in flashes, each more vibrant and horrifying than the last. I would be in a conference meeting and suddenly my daughter’s voice would screech out, “Mommy!” and I’d jump to my feet, calling out a name that I didn’t even know I knew. “Angie!”

I’d wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning, remembering how I forgot to tell my husband goodbye, how I forgot to apologize. But apologize for what? I didn’t know.

It got to the point where the memories consumed my life, and I’d stay in my room, weeping and laughing and moaning and wondering and weeping some more. I saw places, too. A cottage nestled in a cliff by the sea, with dogs running wild on the beach. A high rise hotel in the city, with silver walls and a hundred post-it sized windows. A vacation, a family portrait, in front of Niagara Falls, the faces of my family nipped by wind and wet from spraying water. No, not my family. They weren’t my family.

Or were they?

I didn’t go to work. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. I became absorbed by these memories, by this world, by these people. I replayed images in my head. I re-experienced the moment when my husband and I met. I watched as my sister walked down the aisle, her gown shimmering with sequins that I helped her sew in. I relived the birth of my daughter. I remembered watching her grow up.

I became attached. I became obsessed.

And I questioned what was real.

I wanted this family, these shining people with their beaming smiles and complete lives. I wanted to feel their love again, or for the first time, or for real. Maybe they were my true family; maybe I was trapped in a bad dream, or lying comatose in a hospital somewhere. Or maybe it was from an alternate world, a universe where I was happy, where I had what I wanted. Or maybe it was what could have been, the life I could have lived if I had done something differently, been someone else.

I didn’t know anything…not anymore.

That weekend I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out the window on the muddled street below, watching as cars creeped along the roads like slugs and people scampered about like roaches. This life, this world…what even was it? What was the point of this monotonous routine, this rigid schedule of droning events, when I could have this other life? I had always considered myself sub-par, not entirely useless but mediocre enough to lead a dreary existence. These memories brought an escape, they offered an alternative that I could’ve never imagined, a world where I had what I wanted, one where I had friends and got married and had a child and loved a sister.

But why? Why me? Why now? And what for?

My questions are snakes that worm through my mind, eating away at every sense I thought I possessed. Now I’m left with nothing but bare instinct, and I shrink away into my mind, fitting my thoughts with armor and blocking out the world. I live in the memories now; they are everything.

And I become them.

Then I remember the car crash. It’s an explosion of metal and sound, a fireworks display of blood and blaze. I don’t remember the impact, but I remember the pain. And then I remember the black.

It’s a warm sort of blackness, thick and wet and suffocating, and as I remember I close my eyes. For so long the black has just been there — a dull and lonely piece of oblivion that I sit in, blind and deaf. Then I remember my dreary life, the life of budget meetings and tasteless coffee and watching reality television. The two converge, and the life I abhor becomes the swallowing black. A bleak hole of dark, pointless nothingness.

The voices start out as soft, spindly wisps, brushing against me like feathery tendrils. Voices, calling out to me. Calling a name that must be mine. They build up, pressing in around me and looming high over in staggering towers. Then all at once, they tumble, and I’m buried in noise. Weeping, calling, singing, laughing. The voices of my family, my family from a dream. And ringing clear over all the others is my sister’s voice. “Wake up.”

The black melds into gray, and the gray breaks into a million shades. A million shades that brighten and lighten and whiten…

“Wake up.” A voice choked by tears.

I open my eyes.

I’m in a room with white, speckled walls, lying on a frameless bed with tubes snaking up my limbs and needles sticking out of my skin. My sister’s voice cracks in a flood of emotion, and she begins to sob, clutching my arm with rigid fingers. I blink back the crust that rims my eyes and open my peeling lips. I try to speak, but my throat is tight and my voice a muffled croak. She blubbers nonsensically, her tears gathering at her chin and dripping off onto the covers.

My sister…I don’t have a sister…

But I do. I know I do, because here she is, with her gleaming eyes and toothy grin, so real and alive and here.

She calls out to someone, and a doctor arrives, his pink lips parted as he mutters, “Not possible…”

My sister’s grip tightens over my fingers, and she says something about my husband and daughter. Then I know…this is real. This is more real than anything.

They told me that after the delivery truck plowed into my mini-van, the doctors had little hope for me. They gave my family three months, and they said that by the end of it if I hadn’t woken up, I never would.

It has been two years.

I often think back on that drab and depressing life I lived in my mind. I think back on it, and I’m happy that it wasn’t mine. When I feel a stab of morose for my dementia-ensnared mother, I remind myself that she was a figment of my comatose mind. She wasn’t real.

But then I wonder…is this life real?

I live with the fear that I’ll wake up one day in that bleak apartment, with a hundred missed calls and an endless list of unread emails. I try not to think about the unpaid bills and my unfed cat. Because this life, with my whole family and close friends, is the one I want to live. It is the real one.

But what if it’s not?

I could’ve said no to the old man, the time-worn sailor with withered skin that hung loosely on his cheeks, and wispy, salt-spun hair that created a snarled halo around his head.  I could’ve turned the other way, and gone on without ever knowing what approaching him would mean.  I could’ve…but I didn’t.

He sat on the edge of the dock, swinging his legs over the peaking waves, sucking on a hastily wrapped cigar.  I was a penniless and broken wanderer, with nowhere to go and no one to go to.  I watched him kick at the waves from my spot on the beach.

The moan of a fog horn penetrated the early morning quiet as I scaled the dunes.  It was a forlorn sound, the call of a lonely, bygone drifter…a sound I recognized all too well.  Salty wind whipped around my neck and stung my cheeks, and my hair was sent dancing out behind me.  Before me rose black arches of murky water.  Bleeding fingers of foam branched out from the clashing waves, the remnants of its eternal struggle.  The black sands beneath my feet shifted with the wind, glistening like hot coals.

The old man stood, tapped out his cigar into the sea, and stretched out his ancient bones.  He turned to his boat, a nicked and battered old beast that strained against the ropes keeping it tied to the post.  I watched him walk up the dock, and an inexplicable emptiness sunk within me.  I wanted to cry out, “No, don’t go!”, but I didn’t.

Then he called out to me.  His voice was warped by the sound of the surf, but I knew he was calling to me.  

My bare, calloused feet adhered to the spot, and I strained my ear towards the dock.  

Without turning to look at me, he shouted out again, louder.  “Well, what’re ye doin’?  Get yer britches up here!”

I was confused, but I crossed the beach and stepped onto the dock for curiosity’s sake.  He turned, revealed a mouth full of bronze teeth, and said, “Storm’s settin’ in the east.  If we want to beat it, we best be ridin’ the waves before dark.”  He clapped a hand laced with blue veins on my shoulder, and clambered over the dock and into the boat.  I opened my mouth in question, but he spoke over me.  “Are ye comin’ or not?”

But where?  I tilted my head back to look at the empty beach.  Past the rolling dunes and bowing grasses was nothing for me.  What life I once had was gone.  I had used up all my second chances; I’d drunk any money into the gutters.  My clothes were tattered rags hanging off my knobby shoulders, and I had nowhere to call home.

So I swung my leg over the side of the boat.  “Yes.”

A crooked grin etched across his face.  “We’re off on an adventure, Sullivan!”

I didn’t know who Sullivan was.

We set off on the bucking waves, heading directly towards the swirl of black clouds and white water on the horizon.  All the while the old man called me Sullivan.

With his cigar dangling in his fingers and one hand on the mast, he talked about my mother, an elegant ex-noble woman with hair like a thousand chalky icicles.  He told me how I had her nose, and that my spidery fingers reminded him of how beautifully she played the harpsichord.  He chortled as he managed the sail, and reminded me about the time when I was fifteen, and I stowed away in the neighbor’s carriage to the market.  I had wanted to see a girl, he said, a pretty one; she worked at the bakery with her father, and made my favorite kind of sweet rolls.  Her father caught me with her in the closet, he said, and he chased me out of the marketplace, threatening to bash my brains in with a rolling pin.  My mother was so angry at me that she locked me in the cellar for a week, but she was even more furious with the baker.  In her exasperation, she boycotted his bakery until a guard escorted her out of the village.

As the waves dipped and rose and the wind picked up, he talked about my uncle, a husky naval officer who shared my sense of ambition.  His eyes glinted with pride as he told me about how his son earned his medals.  “Dove in after a comrade durin’ a frightful raid,” he said, his colorless lips stretching as he recounted the memory.  “Saved the man’s blessed life.  Would’ve drowned if hadn’t have been for yer uncle.”

A smattering of icy rain drops diced my skin, and he brought me below deck, where we feasted on stale bread and stinking cheese as the boat lurched and groaned.  He asked after my sister, and without thinking, I said she was fine.  “Well, I ‘spected as much!” he said, taking a swig of ale.  The drink slopped onto the front of his rough-spun shirt when a monstrous wave rocked the boat, but he didn’t seem to mind.  “What with her bein’ married to that duke!  Must have gold spillin’ out of her ears, I always say.”  He offered me his canteen, and when I refused, he waved it in my face.  “Oh, don’t be that way!  I never knew ye to refuse a drink, Sullivan.”

So I drank from the canteen, even though my whiskey sodden stomach frothed at the bitter taste.  

That night, the howling wind lashed against the boat, hissing through the cracks in the ceiling, and the churning waters boiled and belched around us as we slept in our cots.  I drifted into a shaky slumber, but was awoken when I heard whimpers coming from across the cabin.

He was trembling in his cot, clutching to his chest a ceramic vase with swirling shades of blue and green.  I asked him if he was alright, and he looked up at me with a sagging brow.  “She was the prettiest gem ye ever did see,” he said in a thick voice.  His arms tightened around the vase.  “Never did no wrong, had the heart of a doe…but they took her.  They took her from me.”  His eyes shone with a buried melancholiness in the light of the swinging lantern, and his face contorted with the shifting shadows.  “She always wanted to sail ‘round the world, to see all there was to see.  So I take her with me, so she can see with my eyes.”

He planted a light kiss on the urn, and hid it away under his cot.  Then he fell asleep.

The next morning, the storm still raged, and the rain had turned to hard beads of ice.

He told me stories about when I was a child and he’d take me out on the sea in his row boat.  He chortled as he told me about the time I fell into shark-infested waters to go after a fishing line, and he had to dive in after me.  “Scared ye skinny, it did,” he said, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes creasing.  “Ye swore off swimmin’ from that moment on, but yer a sailor’s boy at heart…I knew ye’d never truly give it up.”

He nearly choked on his cigar when he retold the time when my sister and I hid under the banquet table during a family feast and went about tickling the feet of each and every guest.  Smoke billowed up around us, hanging near the ceiling like a hazy smog.  “Yer uncle threatened to tan yer hides when ye got ‘round to his feet!  Said he’d feed yer liver to the goats when he caught ye!  Yer poor sister; she was scared stiff.  Cried for a good hour straight, but was as plump as a peach at the end of it all.”

That night I found him on the deck, braced against the wind and rain, leaning into the torrents with his eyes closed.  His clothes clung to him, and his beard was stippled with rain drops.  I rubbed the sides of my arms and hunched against the downpour, calling out to him.  My voice was lost amidst the shrieking gusts and grumbling thunder.

He blinked back the sheets of rain as he looked at me, and my heart sunk when I saw his lips wilt.  I approached him, and he said in a soft, broken voice, “It was a storm like this that did it for him.  The night before a battle, too..and the sea devoured him.”  He stared out at the angry, black water wistfully.  “Took his whole crew.  Swallowed them up like wee minnows.”

I took his shaking arm and led him below deck, where he met the warm embrace of sleep.

The next day dawned with the winking sun, and we spent the morning on the deck, warming our icy feet and drinking from his canteen.  

He told me how much he had missed me.  How lonely he’d been without my sister and me, how he prayed every day that we’d show up at his doorstep or send a letter or at least attempt some contact.  And it was true; his face would bloom into a metallic smile when he’d see me emerge from the cabin, and he always gave me the larger portion of bread and cheese.

I felt like a monster.  I was a fraud.

On the fifth day, as the sun melted into the sea, he approached me on the deck.

“Yer not Sullivan, are ye?”

My heart dropped into my stomach, and I blinked up at him with sore eyes.  “No.”

He smiled sadly, turned, and without saying a word, disappeared into the cabin below.

The next morning I woke to an empty boat.  The urn beneath his bed was gone.

I wished I had never said yes.