The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

We run out of things to tell each other. We share second- and even third-tier stories we’d never bother other people with. Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.

“This all sounds right, but now I’m questioning myself. I heard that if you remember a thing, you corrupt it. If you want to remember something closest to its truth, the trick is to remember it rarely. But, of course, if you don’t remember a thing often enough, you’re bound to forget it. There is no way for memory to be pure.”

What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what’s ahead?

There are times when saying nothing means nothing, and then there are times when nothing holds an answer.

“I think it is, Jules. I think we’re haunting ourselves. We’re pulling ourselves apart. We’re noticing gaps and stepping into them instead of avoiding them.”

There is no acceptable, untainted name for a wilderness of the mind. People will always wonder what to believe. They expect the stray inaccuracies to be looted out and abandoned. They expect the mind’s voice to unstitch only when alone. When the seams rip, they look away.

Hospitals, I realize, fill themselves full of accusations, of people believing certain truths about their blood and their hunger and their minds, and when another tries to force guidance on any of these topics, the impulse can be to travel as far away from these assumptions as possible.

I search for proof that the world is one way rather than another, but it doesn’t matter what is coming from inside us or around us. Our brains allow it either way. We can lose ourselves behind a trapdoor, whether in our mind or in the house.

There is still a chance that everything might be true, that we both might be filled with scars and substances that cause our synapses to fire inefficiently, that cause us to make decisions that are unwise and fantastic, and to believe what shouldn’t be believed, but that is not to say that the world outside our minds is reasonable. That is just to say there is no sense in knowing where the line is drawn. We can mark the place that indicates This is how much we can take; we can monitor it, but that line, nevertheless, constantly moves.