longbourne
Sometimes she opens her eyes and she forgets where she is.
She looks up at the wooden log ceiling and blinks a few times and looks out the window and sees the lake so close that all she has to do is walk out the back door and down to it to be there and looks at the trees and the clouds and all that pine and she thinks she must have died and woken up somewhere else. She wouldn’t call it heaven. She wouldn’t call it hell. She wouldn’t know what to call it.
Then she remembers.
She takes a deep breath and stares at the ceiling again and feels the ache in her chest like breathing and beating and there’s a cliché about having a bird as her heart and her ribs as its cage and it just wants to break free and that’s a kind of death, too. She gives her heart away and buries it in other people’s ribs and they keep it kept tight in there, so tight it breaks its wings. Maybe her ribs aren’t a cage at all. Maybe the bird of her heart has had its wings clipped. Birds are supposed to fly. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cage or clipping that keeps them tied down. Except if a bird without clipped wings makes its way out of a cage, it can still fly.
This is too much thinking. She doesn’t want to think anymore.
She props herself up on her elbows and forces herself to sit up just enough to see the opposite corner of her bedroom, where there should be a door, and there should be someone standing in that door with a bright smile and frizzy hair just long enough to brush against her shoulders, just watching her, and she would have a tray of breakfast that she did not make because she could not cook – and she probably wouldn’t even have a tray because that’s too fancy and she probably wouldn’t even have any food at all. In reality, she would mention being hungry, and then she would have to get out of bed and they would cook together – which really looked more like her cooking and her watching and occasionally asking questions or making remarks or throwing flour in her face when really she was supposed to be making bread or pancakes or waffles or brownie versions of any of the above – brownie bread the least of those but it worked – sometimes – and half of the time they would end up with burned food because they had been distracted with each other and—
There is no door, and there is no one standing there, and there is no woman with frizzy hair just long enough to brush her shoulders, and there is no one watching her, and she feels so alone.
She’s so tired.
She collapses back against the bed and stares at the ceiling again and wonders if she paints it a bright sunshiny blue and then covers the ceiling with those glow-in-the-dark stars she would like it better.
She wonders if she will ever wake up here and not wonder how she got here.
She doubts it.
It might have been easier to take her mother’s route to get here – to jump off a bridge and hit her head hard enough that she forgets and then come here having forgotten everything. The only things she would know for sure is her life here and her life in whatever hospital she was in and maybe her name, maybe only her first name. That must have been how it worked.
Why hadn’t her mom tried to look for herself? If she couldn’t remember anything, why didn’t she find a computer somewhere and look herself up? (It was the 80’s, she reminds herself. Computers weren’t a thing then like they are now. She couldn’t just look herself up.)
If she woke up with no memories of herself or who she was, she’d use the internet. She’d find out a lot of things about herself that she wouldn’t want to know because that’s what the internet is good for – reminding you of your worst case scenarios and keeping your best case scenarios hidden from journals and journalists and journalism – and she thinks if she couldn’t remember who she was and she looked herself up and she read all of that she’d hide herself away, too. No one who knew her like that could want her back.
And the funny, ironic part of that is that her memoryless self would be right. They don’t want her back. They wouldn’t look for her. They haven’t looked for her.
She thinks of the woman in the corner in the doorway that doesn’t exist and maybe if she wasn’t in jail she would look. Maybe she’s already looking. Maybe she’s not looking because she already knows where she is. They know each other that well.
Would she know where she was if she disappeared without warning? She hadn’t before. Would she know now?
She stares at the ceiling and she takes a deep breath. She has a job now. She’s good at that job. She hasn’t been making mistakes. She hasn’t had anyone trying to convince her that—
She isn’t thinking about the woman she couldn’t see. The one who didn’t exist.
It’s hard enough not to think about the woman who does. She can do without thinking about those who don’t.
She stares at the ceiling and she props herself up with her elbows again and she pushes herself into a sitting position and she leans forward and she takes another breath and it’s another breath and another breath and another one before she pushes herself out of bed.
She tells herself she likes it here because she does. It’s calm. It’s quiet. She doesn’t have to worry about being found because no one really cares about her anyway.
She doesn’t have to fool herself here.
Sometimes she thinks she should have stayed on the island.
Sometimes she thinks her family will love her again.
Sometimes she doesn’t think about any of them at all.