For sale: One Glass Bottle, Memory Included
Open quickly, inhale slowly. Sit down.
The seller claims he doesn’t want it anymore. The memory that is, not the bottle. And not that he has no need of it, but that it makes him cry and he’d rather stop now.
It strikes me as a joke, of course it does. But it’s Sunday and the silence is so silent. And I’m a little drunk.
---
It arrives with instructions. Open quickly. Inhale slowly. Sit down.
As I always have, I do what I’m told.
---
She’s dancing. No furniture, but there’s music. She insists, always, on music. I know this. I know her.
Bare feet on bare wooden floor and painted toenails, pink like dawn. Labelled boxes as high as she is tall. Kitchen. Glassware - Fragile!!! Towels. Bedroom.
She’s dancing. Beams of white streetlight—curtains still in their neat-labelled box. Dancing, and laughing. And it’s the moment that everything begins.
---
I go about my life with the new, old memory. It comes when I need it, when the silence is roaring like the end of the world.
As if it knows.
Knows I will never replace it with one of my own.
About the Creator
Lauren Everdell
Writer. Chronic sickie. Part-time gorgon. Probably thinking about cyborgs right now.
Website: https://ubiquitousbooks.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scrawlauren/
Twitter: @scrawlauren
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More stories from Lauren Everdell and writers in Poets and other communities.
My To Be Read List
I have been taking some time away from writing. I haven't forgotten about Vocal, the truth is I just have been too busy pursuing other things to write online and honestly, my little family and I just had a really hard month between the flu and a weird eye infection/cold circulating our house. I'm currently sipping some warm peppermint tea because my throat is sore.
By Chloe Rose Violet 🌹6 days ago in BookClub
Comments (1)
I remembered what the American poet Robert Kelly once wrote: “Writing is remembering experiences we never had. Writing is alien memory injected into us, so we feel again what we never felt.” I find “And it’s the moment that everything begins” the most expressive line because it evokes such a strong feeling to me, the bittersweetness of a future opening up (back then) but yanked away (at present). As I read it, the line “As I always have, I do what I’m told.” oscillates between sadness (resigned) and something like ironic detachment. I notice you wrote an earlier poem (‘Person’) that ends with that.