The Island of Forgetting

by Jasmine Sealy

What happens to a dream deferred? It grows and grows until it becomes so large it’s hard to imagine how you ever thought it attainable. A hulking mass in your peripheral vision, always just out of reach, like living in the shadow of a mountain.

Time, time, time. This is how it passes, a life made up of one practical decision after the other, a thousand small concessions. And then you don’t often think about them anymore—all of those paths not taken, those lives unlived—but you carry them with you always.

And so we keep moving forward, never losing our balance, lest all those regrets go tumbling to the floor for all to see.

Sometimes you just need to be anywhere other than where you are. Sometimes you need to walk away to remind yourself that you can.

I will never fall in love with someone who makes my world smaller.

The joy was just in being alone, in having no one to answer to, in being under no one’s scrutiny.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Maybe for the strength to tell him that sometimes I feel so out of control of my body and my thoughts that I begin to wonder if my body and my thoughts are even mine, if I’m even a real person or just a piece of loose litter getting carried along in a strong wind. The strength to admit to him that I lost my balance at some point and now life feels like I’m just falling down one endless staircase. Maybe I’m just waiting for him to ask if I’m okay.

What could I possibly mean to a man who spends his life travelling from place to place, forever altering their landscapes in his wake?

I’d begun to think of it as home. But now, as it approaches midnight, I realize home is a place where someone wants you.

“When your father left,” she goes on, “I let him take a piece of me with him. There was so little of me left, I didn’t know how to share it with anyone else. I needed to make something of myself, to build myself into something that he couldn’t ruin. That was just my own. That’s what my art was. Does that make sense at all?”