Muscle Memory

[tanaise]

I am having one of those days where everyone looks like someone else. I walk by three on my way to the metro, and stand by a fourth who tips her head like an old grade school teacher. There are others when I walk from the metro to the office, and each time I pass one, I have to dig my nails into my palms to stop myself from grabbing them, bite my lip to keep from asking them, “Don’t I know you? Haven’t I met you somewhere?” Or more to the point, “Do you know me?” I restrain myself because I don’t know which would bother me more—if they didn’t know me and I was just making things up, or if they did know me, and I’d have to explain why I couldn’t remember them, and yet why I’d recognized them.

Muscle memory, I’d say. Your body remembers the way to move, and the heart is just another muscle.

My body is all that remembers. I have my body, I have pictures and journals and notes and papers and scars. But I have nothing to link them all together with, nothing that lets me say, “This is a picture of the party I wrote in my journal about on May 10th, this is the invitation, and this is the note he passed me asking me out. For not the first time, I wish I’d been the type to make scrapbooks, so I could flip through the pages, and find all the me that I’ve lost over the years.

I torture myself with my lost memories, sometimes. I visit neighborhoods I grew up in, schools I attended, and they are all mysteries to me. I get lost until I close my eyes, and then my hands find the combination on my 8th grade locker, my feet find the shortcuts we made through backyards, and my heart finds the fort we built down by the creek.

I remember Danny drowning in the creek. Not because no one would pay for that memory, but because I didn’t want it to go to the sort of person who wanted snuff. I remember him drowning, but I don’t remember when we met, or what games we played, just the creek, storm-dark from spring rains on plowed fields, much higher and faster than usual, and Danny showing off, tightrope walking on the railing of the bridge.
It should say something about me that all my memories are sad or missing. We are the product of our pasts, they are what we build our futures on, but I have sold mine off, piece by piece, moment by moment, as though they were a renewable resource.

There will always be new things to remember, I told myself, emptying my mind of a birthday party with a bunny cake, a first dance, a first kiss, a first boyfriend. The pay is best for those, I told myself, and even after they’re gone, I’ll make new memories. But I forgot, or I didn’t know, that my body is too smart for that, and won’t be fooled into repeating history.

I have a file folder full of faces at home. Some I remember for real, but they aren’t the good ones—a difficult break up, a stalker, a divorce. The stalker gave up when I sold our relationship--the good parts, at least. It wasn’t as much fun for him once I didn’t know how much he’d loved me, what he’d done for me, what I’d meant to him. I forgot that I was supposed to avoid him, and let him buy me coffee one day. I must have sold the part of me that he loved, because he never bothered me after that.

The folder lets me practice knowing people. I memorize faces and dates. It’s like history, but it was real. It’s like flashcards, but they don’t always add up properly. It’s like getting caught up in a soap. I dated this boy, but dumped him for his roommate. The roommate cheated on me with my roommate, and my roommate ended up marrying my ex-boyfriend. The pictures I have of them are only five years old, but I don’t know if I could recognize anyone from them. Perhaps that’s why everyone looks familiar to me. I’ve spent too long trying to find something to recognize in the pictures that it has become second nature.

Once, when I ran into someone I did know, he stared back at me with the same expression I’ve seen in stranger’s sunglasses. “Mikey,” I called him, and he frowned, as though it almost rang a bell. He was Danny’s cousin from New York, the one who crossed the bridge first. The one who didn’t slip. “I’m sorry,” he says when I explain. “My parents, they had most of that day removed so it wouldn’t scar me. I believe you. I just don’t know you.”


I'm not sure about starting it where it is. I keep wanting to start with the paragraph about Danny, but I'll leave it the way it is for a while, I think.