The Warbler

by Sarah Beth Durst

Unframed photos are too easy to toss. I don’t want to be tossed. I’d rather be gradually forgotten, like a sunny afternoon indistinct from other summer days.

When did I forget what I’ve forgotten?

all bookstores have the same kind of familiarity, a comforting sense of Here you’ll find what you need.

The best thing about books, at least for me, is that favorites can feel like home. Yet they’re portable and replaceable. Any copy will do. Even more, once you’ve read them, they’re part of you. You don’t need the actual book anymore. You can let them go without letting them go. It’s a rare and beautiful loophole in the rules that govern my life, and I’m grateful for it.

His hand rests lightly on an open book, and I wonder if he’s the type who reads to consume or be subsumed.

There’s a trick to compartmentalizing emotion-laden memories, and I’ve nearly mastered it. It’s the “nearly” that I have to watch out for. “Nearly” can kill you. It killed my mother.

I am a rock skimming the surface of a pond, wanting to make ripples but afraid I’ll sink.

Maybe someday I’ll forgive her. Or maybe I won’t. Forgiveness is for people with other things to hold on to.

I can taste the stench in my memory, even now. Some memories are like that, leaving their residue on your senses.

People have poured out of the coffee shop and the post office and the other stores, but I didn’t see them come, and I don’t know why they didn’t come earlier. I think of a flock of crows, drawn from the trees. An unkindness of ravens.

love live music. It’s something that’s actually supposed to be ephemeral. You experience it, then move on, carrying it only as an imperfect memory of how it made you feel. It’s one of the few things that I can experience exactly like everyone else.

“Regrets aren’t a thing you can avoid,” Mom said. “They’re just a part of life. Every time you say yes, you’re saying no to a dozen other things you could be doing.”

“Why are red leaves sad?” Lori asked. “Because they have to say goodbye to their branches,” Elisa said,

She couldn’t help seeing the future splintered in a dozen different directions—every yes was also a no to a hundred other futures, a hundred other Roses. How did she know one of them wouldn’t fit her better?

Wherever you go, you bring yourself with you.

Point is: you weren’t swept along by any tide. You dove into this ocean yourself.”

How can anyone move on when you carry your past with you?

“It’s insidious, the way the world cages us. We don’t realize it’s happening. We don’t see the bars as we blithely walk into the cage. All the expectations . . . on TV, in books, in commercials, the damn baby-doll toys we give our children, the house-and-picket-fence dream, as if it’s what everyone should have. You can say it’s the men, it’s the patriarchy, and it is. Of course it is. But it’s not only the voices outside you that cage you. It’s the voices that you let inside: This is just the way it is, this is the life you should lead, this is what you want, this is who you should be . . .” I walked into my cage.

She used to think she wanted to travel to see cities like Tokyo and Paris and Cairo and Rome. Now she wished she’d seen quiet lakes on mountaintops and seashores with waves so gentle they were like a parent’s kiss.

She’d relived those days in her memory a thousand times until every moment was woven into her mind like the lyrics to a song.

“That’s how the curse wins,” I say. “Expectations cage us. What other people expect. What we think they expect. What we expect of ourselves. The rules that we think are unbreakable.” I

“You know, song lyrics are something we never leave behind,” I say. “We carry them with us even when other memories fade.”