Do you ever think back to transformative moments in your life and cannot recall how you felt at any given time?
How perhaps, none of it felt entirely genuine?
I find myself, mouth agape, as I examine photos taken of me from what feels like lifetimes ago.
I am in my early twenties. Hair chopped short against the back of my neck, eyebrows penciled on thin with black a drugstore charcoal pencil, and my skin so alabaster it looks translucent. I am laughing. I am bent over, with my hands clutching my shockingly slender waist, as a former friend strikes a pose nearby. My denim shorts, stolen from a friend’s closet are barely long enough to cover the wiggly little scars on the flesh of my thighs.
This looks like fun.
Was I having a good time?
How can I not remember?
My hair is blue. Right, I had just moved back in with my mom when my hair was blue.
Was I happy during my blue hair phase?
Do you ever think a polaroid would stir such nausea in the pit of your stomach?
I never even considered it until my thirties were imminent.
I could not call it nostalgia. Nostalgia would at least give me a ghost, a subtle sensation, to how I felt in those pictures.
What is the opposite of melancholy?
I know the melancholy, but I have no sense of the person in those photographs. I have lost so many lifechanging years, inside of myself.
When the memories are stored away, the feelings they inspired just vanish into obscurity.
I do not know the person that loved you. I do not even remember what it was like to feel the skin of your fingertips at the small of my back while I regurgitated several craft beers into manicured grass.
Your voice does not have a tone. It is just the sound of plastic bags being shuffled at a grocery store. It is just the sound of water filling up a bathtub.
White noise.
Your face does not have an outline. It is just the build-up of creamy oil paint on an unwashed palette. It is just the movement of a sweaty crowd slamming against one another at a concert.
Utter chaos.
What is the opposite of melancholy?
I never even considered it until everything became hazy and I found myself on the other side of my voyage.
I do not know the person that loved you. I do not even remember what it was like to be so satisfied by the waters of your vast ocean.
That ship sailed away with my memories.
There is a lighthouse shining brilliantly in my red tinged eyes, looking back from a slightly bent picture.
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