Elsie

Sometimes I wonder if the things that I remember are actually real… I remember a time, back when the two of us used to live in our shabby little apartment in the suburbs of Seattle. We’d fall asleep every night to the leak in the ceiling above our hallway dripping drops into the sauce pan we put there to prevent the carpet from getting wet and the apartment from reeking of mold. Within a few months of moving from Tucson, we learned that mold eventually permeates everything you own, know, and love when you live in the Pacific North West. We’d spend every morning before you left for work sipping coffee and watching the rain. You’d tell me all the wild new things you were learning in school that week and I’d sit there nodding, pretending that I was half as intelligent as you were. When you were away at work or school for the day, I’d often imagine you spying on me. I’d do every boring house hold activity with bold, humorous gesticulations, keeping my posture straight and my hair down so that the imaginary you that was watching me would be impressed by my charm and good looks. ‘He washes the windows so elegantly’ you’d think to yourself as you spied on me through the skylight.

You told me once that the more often you visit memories, the more distorted they become. I still think about that to this day when I find myself trying to imagine where you are in life, who you’ve become, and why you’re not here with me right now, sipping coffee and watching the rain. According to you and all that science you learned in your psychology classes, the stronger the memory you have, the further from reality it is. It’s hard for me to know what to make of that thought when I feel that who I am is largely tied to what has happened to me… Or at least what I think has happened to me.

These days when I think of you, I cant always remember what you look like. My mind paints a picture of you and sometimes I see you as a cartoon, or a fiery haired tree nymph making Tinker Bell faces at me as you laugh. Other times I remember you walking naked through our old dining room, your face featureless and blurred, your body a collection of smeared creams and whites against the grey canvas of the wall. I try my hardest to see the truth through my day dreams, but there is no way of telling if the truth of it even exists anymore. I remember the last time I saw you like a scene in a surreal soap opera. The actor that plays me is a caricature of myself, so dramatized and inflated that I hardly recognize him as being me. I see my self screaming words that I don’t even remember into your face, and I see you as a spotted red doe, destroying the kitchen table and everything on it with your violently kicking hooves before you storm out the door and gallop off into the rain. If all I have is my memory to rely on when my memory tells lies, I cant be certain anything exists.

I don’t know if there is a god, but if there were, I’d hope that he would function as some sort of record keeper of time. I don’t have any memories of, or strong associations with the idea of god. I don’t have much of anything at all to let my mind latch onto when trying to conjure answers about the tenuous connection the past has with reality, but when I try to imagine a god, or a god like entity, I imagine a barn owl. I envision every moment, thought, movement, and interaction that has ever existed, or is still yet to exist lying peacefully and protected under his infinitely vast wingspan. All the answers I seek are hidden within his large, knowing eyes. He knows so that I don’t have to. He knows what really happened to us. He knows where you are in life and who you’ve become. He knows Elsie, that you are real.