Like It Never Was

by Faith Gardner

The memories made me mean. It was like a drug kicking in, my anger.

I thought I was a good person. But like love, goodness is never really unconditional. Push, push, push … at some point, somebody’s going to push back.

“Don’t believe everything you Google, kid.”

In the end, I’ve accepted I occupy a strange space where I’m not quite sane and not quite insane, not quite sober, not quite an addict. I’m just a professional dropout. I’ve got commitment issues.

She studies me and it’s possible that I might burst into flames under the relentless magnifying glass of her gaze.

I love this first stage when cities, jobs, and people are brand new. Like the beginning of a passionate affair—a place of pure potential, where anything can happen. Nothing will crash and burn. No, never.

Is this a heart attack? Is this my still-young body crumbling already due to the pills I’ve popped and the booze I’ve guzzled and the poor eating habits that have stacked up over the years?

Yikes, she makes me sound awful. Am I that awful? Maybe I am. But anyone could sit down and write a CV of their wrongdoings and look like a horrid human being, right?

“We’re born alone and we die alone. Company is temporary.” Well, damn. That’s some chilling nihilism right there.

Look at her and all she’s been through, thriving and getting an advanced degree to help people. Meanwhile, I wander around like a lost woman-child and my daddy helps pay my rent.

If there is an opposite to nostalgic, I am that. What point is there in ruminating on what’s fixed and far behind? For the same reason I keep my eyes ahead of me when I’m walking, I keep my eyes ahead of me in time’s relentless march forward. If I don’t, I might trip and hurt myself.

Furthermore, my father taught me an important lesson at a young age: memories are nothing but lies we tell ourselves.

“Nearly seventy percent of wrongful conviction cases are due to eyewitness testimony,” he yelled over the vacuum as he ran it back and forth across the carpet. Even when cleaning the house, he wore pressed slacks and dress shirts. “Can you imagine how many suckers have been locked up because of some bullshit story someone told themselves?”

“The brain is rife with mistakes. I mean, sweet Jesus, how many times a week do you slip up and realize you misremembered something? Then imagine you put someone on the witness stand, someone who’s been coached by the system, and then you have some poor schmuck behind bars for the rest of his life because someone told themselves a story.”

I don’t know how to answer him, how to tell him that there’s just something inside me that never feels like it will be right.

A life full of anecdotes with no real plot.

The truth has given me an almost benzo-like buzz

It’s like someone installed a self-destruct button inside me, and what a comfort it is to know the option is there.

Yes, I actually say this as I stand here looking like someone in the “before” half of a commercial for antidepressants.

“I’ve been on a lot of things, but for short periods of time. I was addicted to Ativan. So when I went to rehab for a few days, they prescribed me Paxil while I tapered off. That started me down the rabbit hole. Paxil gave me the cold sweats, so a few months later, they put me on Prozac, which made me horribly anxious. So I went off that. A year or so later I gave Zoloft a shot, but the headaches were awful. I didn’t try anything again for a while after that, until just a few months ago, when the doctor gave me Wellbutrin and it made me have blackouts every time I drank so I stopped taking those.”

Wouldn’t that be wild, if drugs were the answer this whole time, but I just chased all the wrong ones?

She knows. You know she knows. She knows you know she knows.

You should know by now that monsters are best kept under the bed. Or better yet, locked inside my brain.

I’m at that life phase where holidays no longer matter. I’m far too old to get excited about them and I’m childless.

I don’t think she gets that these are not ordinary blues I’m dealing with. I’m straight-up unraveling.

She looks so together, like someone who has a gym membership and knows what’s up with her city council members.

Mirrors are tricks. Shiny lies. I’m not really there at all and neither is my image—a mirror is nothing but light bouncing back at us without scattering.

In the pause that stretches, I try to imagine a future and it’s impossible. It’s like imagining death, or what’s beyond the universe—endless blankness, blackness, a bottomless void.

“It’s not so bad living in the real world,” he says softly. “In the real world, you have a clear head and food in your fridge and furniture. You have friends. Maybe even a boyfriend-girlfriend-nonbinary friend or whatever you’re into these days.” “I’m graysexual,” I say. “Grayromantic.” His mouth is still open but his eyebrows furrow. “The hell is that? You like old men?” “No, I only feel romantic feelings or attraction some of the time, in very specific circumstances.” “You mean, like everyone in the fuckin’ world?” He scoffs. “‘Graysexual.’ I try to keep up with you and your generation, but Jesus.”

But I’ve already been sorry. I’ve been sorry my whole fucking adult life. Sorry is the cage I live in. Sorry is the shadow that chills my every waking moment. Sorry is the boulder to my Sisyphus. I’m done being sorry.

I think, you know, every job I’ve ever had has taught me something. I might be one inch deep, but I’m also ten miles wide.

Ugly pictures. I would do anything to erase them. When they bring back lobotomies, I’ll be first in line. But for now, I’ve got to live with these brain stains.