***
One day a man, who is perhaps my suitor, keeps a secret from me at an art museum. We have just passed a display of ceramic eggs enameled by a famous artist, that my friend brought in from outside and threw on the ground. (Live art.) I judged him for his careless behavior. Now we are running up flights of white-railinged stairs. the building is wide and open - made of tan cement, rough, like houses in Senegal. All the art is in muted earthy colors. I fall behind with a friend, perhaps it is Guy or someone I like. I am close with him. The others see the roof display before we even arrive, and are coming down the roof stairs. Black shoes - or railings.
_______ suitor, who may look like a faux rapist but more subdued, finer features and sad, seeing, compassionate eyes, shuffles my friends through the door and wont let me see them go with them and wont let me go on the roof. I hold eye contact with him, asking him why he is hurting me - his eyes say he knows what he does, he is stuck between sorry and resolute.
Flash to some kind of dorm, nice with plush tanish-rose carpeting and my room sort of looks like a kids, but with teenage-ish posters hanging all over. Same lighting as before.
My relationship with my friends is weird. Something is up here, but I can't figure out what. All I know is the strange event in the museum. Eventually, something leaks, perhaps on a napkin - that people are fucking with my brain - erasing it. Experimenting. Guy is my room mate and he is lying on our white cushion-y bed with white railings (like Jen's old bed), subdued. Maybe they are experimenting on him too.
Suitor/now morphing into my father finds out I'm on to something. For the first time in my life I feel found. But he comes to me in the brightly lit hallway as I'm unlocking my door and tells me he has to erase me again. The project's screwed up, I can't know what's going on. I cry - and am desperate. Please, I have found myself. Again, his eyes are between sorry and resolute, fixed but sad.
I open my door and inside are now pictures of kids - I look in the mirror and I am a little kid with dark pigtails. The room and the pictures have been hastily re-arranged.
I begin to hang my drawings from school around the house. But I see that, scrawled in neon orange crayon, the friends I have written are not my own, I don't know them.
I am too little to comprehend, but something of my older memory remains. I am angry. I know that someone is fucking with me.
It may have gone on through more stages. They're trying to develop a memory chip that looks like those of a camera, but is for the brain. People who want to forget. My own father chose me as the subject. (But he's the suitor guy.)
I cry and cry. I have lost myself and have no memory of who I am. Crushed, my father/suitor turns to sorry and realizes the terrible wrong he's done to someone he loves who's gentle, trusting, honest, and strong.
No comments:
Post a Comment