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The wind has picked up outside. The last golden days of September might be over—today was gray.
Flames flicker all around us like we’re sitting in a hearth. The shadows of the objects in the room grow wild and strange, dancing on the walls.
The pull to sink back into that deep and restful state is an undertow, but I resist, paddling on the surface…
“I don’t like not remembering.”
That blank hole in my day creeps me out, like someone took a melon baller and scooped three hours out of my brain.
Not “somebody”—the man standing across from me, making a low, snorting sound like memory is overrated. Or worse, according to him…
“Half your memories are lies.” Dane lights one last candle over the mantle.
He says such odd things so matter-of-factly.
“How can a memory be a lie? It’s what you saw happen.”
“What youthinkyou saw.”
Dane shakes out the match he was using before it can burn his fingertips.
“Think about it—when two people disagree, how come they’re each remembering the version of events that benefits themselves? The mind sees and stores what it wants to.”
I make a disdainful sound. “Then how can anyone know what’s true?”
“If you’re honest with yourself,” Dane says quietly. “But nobody is. You tell yourself a lie, and you tell yourself the lie again…and soon you can’t see anything else. Even when it’s right in front of your face.”
Unbidden, I think of the stack of bills on my father’s desk—bills months and years out of date, gone to collections, while we rode elephants in Thailand and took a freighter to the Antarctic. No life insurance for him or my mother. The lie was that we were rich. The lie was that nothing could hurt us when we were all so happy…
I could have seen signs. Times my father was stressed, times he fought with my mother. Twice, I saw her swipe a credit card and it wouldn’t go through. Once my father bought a new car, and a week later it was gone from the driveway. And once Jude’s school called in a snit over tuition instead of his behavior.
Warning lights blinking all around, but they meant nothing to me at the time.
Most I barely registered. It was only later, when I combed through the bills, that I remembered how, for a second time, the cashier at the grocery store swiped my mother’s card and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, it says it’s declined…” and my mother got so angry…
I think how often I smelled perfume on Gideon’s clothes and tried to tell myself it was flowers in the room or someone he’d sat close to on a train…
You fucking fool.
“I don’t want to lie to myself.”
Dane gives me a look with a surprising amount of sadness in it. “We’ll see.”
He sits on the floor this time, across from me. His rug is thick, we’re comfortable. The flickering candles and the wind outside the windows make it feel more like a seance than a meditation session…which is fitting. My head is full of ghosts.
Including Gideon.
That’s what blocking someone is—it’s erasing their face, their voice, out of your life like they’re dead.
I ghosted him. I made him my ghost.
“What are you thinking about?” Dane’s voice makes me jump.
“I…”Fuck, why am I so slow... “…don’t want to tell you.”
Brilliant.
“Do it anyway.”
