Things I'll Never Forget

But Sort of Wish I Would

We’re home. We’re home. We’re home. We’re home. We’re home. We’re home.

It’s hard to tell who’s most pleased by this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s Jax from the way he rubbed his huge golden haired body up and down the couch, rolled around in the back yard a few times, and then passed out in his favorite corner of the living room.

Something about this house allows me to breathe all the way in and all the way out. If you’ve been around a while, you know that my debut novel is based on the magical sense of home I’ve found within these walls, but if you’re new here: Welcome! I regularly assign personality traits to inanimate objects. And structures.

But honestly, this house deserved a little facelift after everything I put her through over the past 11 years. Raising me through my 20s was no easy feat.

And we are SO happy with the remodel. The house still holds the same charm it did when I stumbled through my young adulthood. It’s still where I fell in love with life again. It’s still where Tanner and I fell in love with each other, and even where he proposed. But now, instead of feeling like it’s my house that Tanner lives in, it feels like our house: where we cook dinner, proofread each other’s writing, and rest between our big adventures.

And I am as grateful as I know how to be. For this house and for this life. As Jane Austen would say, “I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”

We had so much unpacking to do, it was ridiculous. But I felt struck by the fact that out of all the practical and important things that needed to get done, putting the magnets and pictures back on the fridge and checking on my wall of bookshelves took precedence. I reflected on this and realized it’s because both are full of things I never want to forget: memories in photographs, pieces of stories that moved me, places that changed me, old journals and art projects—things and moments I treasure.

But I think this line of thinking, the one about remembering and forgetting, began the night before when we stayed at my dad’s before the big move-in. I slept in my childhood bedroom. It’s a queen-sized bed, so I kicked my husband out and sent him down the hall. The room has been completely redone, but the bed and windows are in the same place. Familiar smells and sounds filled the air as I lay there thinking about our massive to-do list for the next day. Then I realized that this was the first time I had slept in my old room since high school.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve stayed at the house since then. Many times. But for some unknown reason (or very obvious reason, according to my Dad), I’ve always stayed in one of the other guest rooms. Maybe it felt too hard to face the fundamentals of my pain. The room where many of my cracks formed as I tried to build a personality from scratch, brick by brick. But I guess something about finishing the book settled my foundation in a way that made it safe to rest in the place where the fracture originated.

But as I drowsed in the blueprint of my primordial pain, I thought of the things I’ll always remember, even when I’d rather forget.

Before I went up to bed that night, I locked the front door of my childhood home, and like muscle memory, pulled the handle up and twisted the knob in that unremarkable yet totally unique way the mechanics have demanded since 2005. My body held the memory so close to the surface, yet if you had asked me outright, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

And I’m happy some prior copy of myself, a more internalized nesting doll, remembered how to do that. But sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler for my busy brain if I could just forget. It would be less messy, perhaps, less uncomfortably full.

But maybe it’s more so in the difference between the welcome memory of my first love playing the song he wrote me in the courtyard of that house when we snuck away from the High School Musical Cast party, and the embarrassing truth that the words still get stuck in my head fifteen years later.

Kiss me softly and hold me tight

If there’s a God, then he’s alright to me

The following is from my notes app. Maybe it’s a poem? I don’t fucking know. It is what it is- AKA what came up as I dozed off in the house that witnessed my rupture, before moving back into the house that saw to my repair. I would lie and say I hope it makes sense, but I don’t feel like it.

Without further ado…but definitely with some ado because why would I ever make anything fucking simple… I present to you:

Things I’ll Never Forget, But Sort of Wish I Would

My middle school boyfriend’s phone number

The way he looked in his pink collared shirt with the powder blue polo pony

The shame of realizing everyone knew how far we’d gone at the movie theatre over the summer

How small I felt when my teacher dress-coded me in front of the entire class

The words to the song my high school boyfriend wrote for me

The look on his face when I broke his heart

The physical sensation of my organs failing when he broke mine right back

A catalog of how much I weighed down to the decimal point every month of my life from age 9 to 27

The way the cheese and bologna sandwiches tasted in Travis County Jail

The booking officer’s voice when she told me she liked my butterfly earrings

What I wore to my first recovery meeting

What it feels like to be flying through the air in one moment and have a horse stepping on your ribs in the next

The deep, sorrowful ache of having a horse’s trust, then losing it

My little sister's face when I snapped at her in Amsterdam for using my straightener

The haunting, human look in that Baboon mother’s eyes as she held her dead baby in Tanzania

The kid in India swindling dumb tourists who reminded me of the Artful Dodger from Oliver

My husband’s voice when he called me and told me his little brother had been in a horrible accident

The way Lilah snored as she slipped into death like a dream

The way Hope’s eyes stayed open and never closed again

And anytime my mother has ever cried.

But then again, if it came down to it, and I stood at the mercy of a witch’s wand, maybe I’d plead for it all to remain

The sweet bitterness of the bittersweet

If there’s something you’d rather forget, may it float away without a care. And if there’s something you wish to always remember, may it take root in you once and for all.