The Memory Book

by Lara Avery

It’s because there’s this part of me that wants to be extraordinary. Like I want to believe that if you work hard and you have good ideas, you can be who you want to be.

The look on his face said he knew exactly what I meant, and the pleasure of being recognized was like fingers tracing my back.

I was pausing every few seconds to write the answers, then going back to molding this godforsaken bowl, which at this point looks more like the alcoholic cousin of a bowl, loopy and friendly and just not functional at all, like my dad’s cousin Tim, who at family gatherings always asks me when I’m going to put my brain to good use and go on Jeopardy! and win him some money; reason #5,666 why I need to keep said brain intact and get the hell out of here.

I know how love works, Future Sam, I read about it in National Geographic. It’s a firing of neurons and a release of dopamine, what neuroscientists call “attachment chemicals,” and this combined with the evolutionary imperative to reproduce creates a conditioned pattern of behavior. You seek out your love object for the same reason you seek out another piece of candy: because you want those sweet feelings again. But no one ever told me how easy it would be, how good it would be. I mean, they did, they tried, Shakespeare tried, the Beatles tried, but I still didn’t know it would be like this.

How can one body hold so many different people? I wonder how someone can want such different things in such a short time.

But the more you win, the more people you might have to beat out, or have to leave behind, the smaller your world becomes.

I was so busy thinking about how I could be better than everyone that I stopped seeing anyone else at all.