The Island of Forgetting

by Jasmine Sealy

So, no, Daddy was dead, but he wasn’t gone. His violence lived in my brother, in my mother, and in me. He was there, at the bottom of every rum bottle, waiting for me. I felt him inside me, like a searing itch beneath my skin. Like I had taken the sun and swallowed it whole.

What does it say about a man who sleeps with his soft belly exposed? I wouldn’t know. I sleep tight to one side of my bed, my body curled around itself. “As if you are your only precious thing,” Pleione would say.

He looks up at me, and I know. Before he even says anything, I know what is going to happen. I am filled with the sense that I have lived this moment a thousand times before. That my life is a series of false choices, an illusion of free will, like so many branching rivers all leading to the same inevitable sea.

There is a thrilling kind of freedom in this. I shed pieces of myself as I walk, bits I leave behind me, scattered like breadcrumbs. But no one is following my trail, no one tries to find me. These are parts of myself I can feel, even in this moment, are lost forever. I know this feeling, I’ve felt it before.

My grandmother likes to say that my mother suffers from too much imagining. “If a chicken escapes from the yard all I want to know is who left the gate unlocked,” my grandmother once said, “but your mother wonders where it is headed, and what it will do when it gets there.”

“There you go again,” she says, “finding a way to drown in an inch of water.”

I can’t control the madness that runs in my bloodline. Maybe it will come for me, maybe it won’t. But freedom, that’s mine for the making.

Anger erupts at the base of my spine, an old, familiar burn. I thought I had buried that part of myself, but the fire lay waiting within me, and it’s comforting, that heat.

Is this it? This is the man who passed through my mother’s life like a hurricane, leaving her flattened in his wake? The mythical man who haunted my childhood dreams? I almost laugh at how ridiculous it all is now, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

I think I understand something about my grandfather now. And about myself. Two fatherless sons so hollowed out by our anger and loneliness we became invisible to each other. When we pull into the departure terminal, the driver asks me where I’m going and I tell him I don’t know yet. Home, I think. Or somewhere like it.