TheBanyanTree: Random writing

[Monique Colver]

When she looked back at her life, at the whole of it, she wondered how she
could have missed so much of it. It’s not as if she didn’t remember it,
that’s not the same thing at all, but she wanted more to have lived it, and
not just remembered it. It was well documented, her life, from the earliest
pictures to the more recent ones that showed her saggy wrinkled face, but
documentation wasn’t the same as living, was it? She had proof she’d lived,
but proof wasn’t what she wanted. Sometimes she thought that she might
prefer to have no proof, for then she could remember it the way she wanted.
Pictures had their own way of making all the things she didn’t remember
seem more real, more present, and the things she did remember weren’t the
same in the pictures. It was as if the pictures were of someone else’s life.


It wasn’t the way she remembered it.


Sometimes she would try to tell her husband how she felt, and he would look
at her with that expression he had, the one with the raised eyebrows and
the crinkly smile right at the corners of his mouth, as if he were trying
to keep from laughing, and the feelings would dissipate, as if swallowed
whole by his disbelief.

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She’d turn away then, so he couldn’t see her confusion as she tried to
remember what she’d been feeling, what she was trying to say.


Words were so much harder now than they had ever been before. They had
faded away, along with her appetite and good looks, and contentment, which
had once seemed to have no end to its abundance.


She was no longer content, not with her life or her place in the world, and
she didn’t quite know what had happened to it. There were days when she
thought her husband, the fourth, had stolen it from her, and she would yell
at him to give it back, that she knew what he’d done.


And when she did, he did not look at her bemusedly, but with disdain and an
impatience that flew across his face like an afternoon storm. That wasn’t
as bad as what followed though, his conciliatory tone, “Rach, you’ve
forgotten again.”


She was fairly certain she had three children, or maybe it was two. Maybe
four. When she couldn’t remember she would take out the pictures labeled
“family” to see if it would come back to her, but she couldn’t tell from
the pictures of smiling children if they were the same people in later
photos, grown up and mugging for the camera. She thought sometimes she
might have five or six children because they looked so different from one
time to another. She’d stopped asking her husband because he always sighed,
as if she were intentionally forgetting.


In the afternoons she’d go to her room at the end of the hall, though
sometimes she wasn’t sure if it was her room or the room of her daughter,
if she had a daughter, and she’d stretch out on the big bed covered in the
quilt she was fairly certain that someone who looked like her had made
once, and she’d sleep for an hour, maybe two.


And in her afternoon sleep she would remember her life the way it was, all
the joy and all the sorrow, all mixed together like it is in life, her
children the proper number, her husbands too. She’d wake up with a smile
because that had been her life, and she loved it all, when she could
remember how it had been.


She never dreamed at night, only in the afternoons, and so she never missed
an afternoon nap, and every day she woke up from it she wished she could
sleep more, if only to remember who she had been.


Monique