Which should make more sense after watching this:
Anyway, the former video was obviously inspired by the latter and I was about halfway through the video when I suddenly remembered (ha!) my own entry into the unofficial "Do You Remember?" project (which only exists in my head). I wrote this all the way back in October as my first assignment for the Fiction II creative writing class I was taking at the time. It's a short-short (it could only be 500 words max) and it's called "And When I Get Lonely I Explode". Enjoy.
...
Do you
remember late afternoons in summer looking out the kitchen window of my old
house? Our hands inside yellow rubber gloves submerged in dingy, soapy water
floating food bits like soup? And we stood pressed together on a chair pulled
from the dining room table because each of us was too short to reach the sink
without it?
We stood
hip to hip and elbow to elbow and you told me whenever you got lonely you would
explode. Pieces of you flew straight up sometimes, or flung out at the walls.
Sometimes it happened slowly so you’d watch as your arm separated from your
shoulder, your hand from your wrist, your fingers from your palm, and you found
mouse holes along the baseboards that led to labyrinthine cities lit with
Christmas lights like a constant night full of stars.
The mice lived in apartments with sardine can doors and each of them shared a
name with one of the bottles in my mother’s spice rack:
Oregano
and Bay and Tarragon and Caraway. Tellicherry
was the fashionista in the wide-brimmed silk hat who always spoke in a smoky
lilt
like we thought all women of sophistication were meant to speak.
Do you
remember? We huddled together atop that chair and traded turns between a rough
blue sponge and a worn dishrag. It was only ever a game when you came over. I
remember you had one of those stretchy bands with the metal tube pinching the ends
together. If you didn’t use it to tie your hair back I’d steal it away and chew
on it though it tasted like shampoo and old spit. I’d loop it around my tongue
to keep from swallowing it.
And
there were times when you’d absolutely turn to dust. You told me your parents
came home and sometimes it’d be like walking through the desert from the front
door to the door of your bedroom. You’d get caught in the breezes of the air conditioning
and end up in places that were unexpected. Just a speck of you could leave
through the screen covering your window and travel for miles on the breaths of
neighborhood dogs and enter a drainage pipe where a pack of small, feral
children lay head to foot in dead silence with their thoughts.
I made
you promise that we’d find that pipe because you said there were at least a
half dozen of them and they all looked the same with skin like sausage casings.
We never went looking because there was always some excuse not to; then we
forgot in the way that so many things were pushed from our minds in those days.
I moved away and sent letters. You sent some back, though one of us must’ve
stopped responding because I barely know you anymore. Your face is scary now in
a way that I don’t remember. Womanly.
