Flickers of Mnemosyne by Kaia Boyer
The star beside a constellation’s light is brief.
Retinas and lenses pass over magnificence as if it is merely a mimic. This star has a name, a concrete place in the sky. A birth, a shining, a death. There is an abundance of stars and yet we focus on the ones conveniently placed in the right spot to make a pretty picture.
I search for the stars that slip between the cracks. The ones that gather brilliance in the dark and let their light trickle through the space they’re given. If there is a supernova out there we have not yet found, I pledge to locate you and write you into the record. Your light is explosive and deserves to leave a disastrous residue.
Earlier, I paused when I typed ‘a nice perfume’ into my birthday wishlist.
This is normal, I told myself, yet I’ve found myself reminded again and again that my life will not be normal. I have spent hours pondering the life I will miss because of a thing I cannot change, a thing, a plague and a plaque, a thing.
(Girls are the epitome of my being but my world views this– the most common splendor, love– as the shape of strangeness.)
But this– nice perfume– is part of normality, but like my biology lab, it does not mix well with the differences of my desires.
Wishing for girlish things reminds me that I am just like everyone else.
Have you ever found yourself snagged in a loop? Have you ever caught yourself passing through life with as much insignificance as a weed breaking its way through sidewalk squares? Have you ever thought about, during history, wanting to learn about the ones whose lives were mundane instead of listening to the speeches made about the great wars and great heroes that invade our history books? Have you ever wondered about the simple beings that fell through the grate of forgetfulness? Have you ever thought I love you but I cannot end up like you, lost to the wonders and woes of time?
I write obsessively. At least the oils from my hair will stain my keyboard if I cannot stain the world.
My dad’s contact list is as long as a CVS receipt.
Sometimes I wonder how he does it. Sometimes I envy him. He says talking to people excites him, that talking to people is a skill you cannot teach. His words affect them. He thumbs phone numbers into the screen while I thumb stories no one will read.
My hair sheds like a dog.
The thin, frail strands tickle my arms and my collarbones as they fall, and I suspect I always look like I am fighting an invisible wasp as I look for what’s causing the disruption.
Sometimes the fallen threads stick to my clothes, and it’s like I’ve torn them all out and arranged them in a picture of unintelligible swirls across my shirt. When I pluck them between two fingers and watch them float to the floor, I feel a comforting sensation in my chest, knowing that until it gets swept away by a broom at the end of the day, or wisped into the ocean, or caught in a shadowed corner, or decomposes when outside, it will linger. A part of me lays where no one will see it but it is, undoubtedly, there.
I walk through life wondering if the things I do affect a stranger.
I step onto the bus at this time, with this movement, a hand on the rail to pull myself off the curb. I speak too loudly when I talk to my mother in broken Chinese on the phone. Am I ruining your day? Have I lit the fuse of irritation and sent it running up your spine? Have I inconvenienced you to the point you will be muttering about it in your mind for however long you please? I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t want to be perceived in such a way. But I suppose it is right that being a nuisance is the best way to loiter in someone’s thoughts without trying.
There are times when I do want to try. I act to catch attention. I go out of my way to do this specific move and follow by scolding myself because that is not the authentic me. I wonder how I will look to a stranger on the bus when considering this skirt with this shirt?, when considering which shoes will almost step on the strap of their sitting backpacks. I speak in certain words and in certain tones. There is always something out there observing me, a girl, a goddess, but maybe it’s fruitless. “I told you this last week, remember?” might as well be ingrained into my tongue.
I once wrote a piece on sculpting during Ancient Greece.
I sometimes wonder why sculptors don’t make statues of humans anymore. A part of us, sure. But not our full bodies. I've always believed we're something tremendous to admire. Isn’t it wonderful, our flesh? The soft curves, the spontaneous dimples, the marks that make us different but the figures that make us the same. Statues were love letters to the body. They help us remember exactly where we came from; how we’re not so different from centuries before.
I find it hard not to write about love. The kind that takes something as simple as memorization and molds it into the one force stronger than will, the kind that traces lips with fingers and whispers into the darkness. We take memory for granted. Our hippocampi can only handle so much. We don’t understand what we’ve lost of each other until we cannot remember what it is exactly we’ve misplaced.
I think memorization is the greatest gift you can give someone. What better way to say I love you than sacrificing a limited space in an unreliable vault for something so insignificant as us?
“While I did, wholeheartedly, enjoy writing it, this piece took one hell of a toll on me. It left me with that tight, sinking feeling in my chest, that I've got all the words out and the idea down but that it's just not good enough or up to my usual par. My writing peers told me differently, so I sent it out, but after a few rejections I was sure I was never going to find a good home for it nor be truly happy with it, and left it to sit in my little yellow-tagged folder in Finder, never used and rarely opened. But I love this piece and I love the concept I ended up with.”
Kaia Boyer (they/she/he, Twitter @kaiaiswriting) is a Chinese-American author born and raised in California. While she's not reading and writing, she can be found on the softball field pitching wildly, and or trying (and failing) to manage their parakeets. They’re currently revising their second novel.