The Outline of Everything I Need to Forget
By Jessica Evans
Introducing myself has always been difficult and when people mispronounce my name, sometimes I wish I was in fact a sweet bird so I could become buoyant, grow wings, and finally take flight.
The work of outlining everything I need to forget is a labor of love. I need to populate my world with indifferent ghosts who don’t mind my tears or my smiles.
This is a way of living in which forgetting and remembering tumble like gemstones, so I can create my own universe. Memories walk by me too often; my life is waiting to become a ritual. So, it’s time to turn my missions into milestones.
I have never known a body as well as I know my own, a fact that both mystifies and saddens me.
Let me begin by forgetting my childhood, a phase I left early, willingly, with determination.
My mother, Shirin, knew I was different and still demanded I conform. She braided my hair too tight, dressed me in outfits with too many drills. When she found me out back cutting the heads off of dolls, she wrapped my hands in linen and tied them with silver bows. Mother told me I would forget this and still, I have not.
I wanted to become an architect to have control over the guts of structures, to create from nothing, to morph ideas into existence. When my father found out I got a subscription to Architectural Digest, he proceeded to burn every month’s copy, making me stand sentry in the kitchen. Wanting became a ritual.
The fleeting lovers of my late teen years were liars, all.
Heather’s memory came to me unbidden in hours when I was most fragile. The first time I saw her, I pretended like I didn’t see her theft. She stole from the store but she was stealing from my mother, not from me. Who was I to stop her? Days later, when I was in the alley on the phone with Pauline, Heather passed out right in front of me. I can still smell the sticky-sweet of her vomit, the way she kept saying sorry like a mantra. Heather’s ghost appeared in front of me in the early morning hours of my first years of college, when I was alone late at night walking the streets of Clifton. The whisper of her voice, the way her eyes slowly drifted close. I don’t know if I saved her life that night, but I do know she saved mine. We were never lovers and yet I know she knew my heart.
Pauline promised me the world if I believed in her, so I did, and she left me anyway. Najda told me that the world deserved to know my name, so I spoke up to be seen and only ended up attacked. Cynthia only loved me when no one else was around. None of these women knew me the way Heather did.
On my own, sunrises were no more special than as a child.
If I became flat in my twenties, it was only because there was no one effusive to bubble me up. I looked for champagne lovers the way I used to look for colors but every search ended up inconclusive. I yearned for Heather, kept tabs on her on social media, but never allowed myself to reach out.
My parents died within quick succession of one another, a fact that surprised us all. Samir never wanted to run the store but I never thought I’d end up doing anything differently. So at thirty-five, when I found myself walking the old trails at Burnett, wishing for Heather, I wasn’t really surprised.
Conclusions are like funerals, except they’re never really permanent.
Decades on, these ghosts are less apparitions and more companions. I lean into their presence during my morning walks, during the long hours at the store where it seems like the students keep getting younger and younger. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if that robbery would have killed my mother. Pauline never ended up managing corporate takeovers but she did end up managing the northwest district for Kroger. It’s not quite the same, but I guess it’s close. Heather’s on her way back to Cincinnati. I know from her social feeds and when she comes back, I hope she chooses this hill to live on, this one to look for love. I hope she finds her way here, to me.
My mission has never been clear, so it’s no wonder I have no important milestones to reflect upon and all too much to forget. I want to let these haunts slip from memory, but who else will keep me alive?
Jessica Evans is the author of LEARN TO FIND (2014), HIPPIE MAFIA (2016), and PHANTOM GRIEFS AND KITCHEN MAGIC (forthcoming, 2021). Evans earned her MFA from Spalding where her fiction work focused on the agency of female and female-identifying characters. Her work can be found in LEON Literary Review, The Louisville Review, Louisiana Review, Outlook Springs, and elsewhere. She is the EIC of Twin Pies Literary and the prose editor for Knights Library. Evans has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Hang out with her on Twitter @jesssica__evans.
