Story: A Remembrance

Sometimes it is incredibly difficult to lose yourself. It is the end of 1999, and I stand in a shuffling line, waiting to receive my second blank slate, waiting to be released at the end of the line into a desolate landscape. When the teacher finally gives it to me, carelessly, I am already taking my first steps into the milky sea that separates me from that blessedly lonely land. I open the sheet, and the black letters float upon the surface for one suspended moment, but then they begin to sink, sink underneath the white sea, sink and form a path for me so I might pass through the whitewashing waters.

It is the beginning of 2000, three days into the unwritten year, and already I have reached that land. It is as yet empty, and yet not empty – shadowy figures flicker, extending temporary hands and words, but as I navigate the tricky corridors of this unchartered ground, I find myself unable to decide where the new borders should be drawn, and therefore unable to bridge the remaining steps it takes to bring them into permanent existence. I watch myself constantly, fearful that the paint on my surface might crack, might reveal the old tracings and scars. Already the film on my eyes has fractured, allowing flashes of false recognition to cross fleetingly pass them in the outlines of the past. Already dark clouds frame the sky, already the shadows seem to press upon me, seeking solidarity.

But then I find a shelter, a shelter where a half-finished man sits talking to a shadow. He is not like the shadows, he springs into this world half-formed against my will, created by the same inescapable attractions that pulse underneath my skin, that remain alive beneath the solid shell of white anonymity. Outside the three of us there is nothing, or at least nothing significant. An indistinct figure, a woman, reads loudly from a list, and from her hands pieces of paper begin to trickle. A mass of shadows male and female laugh. Another reads. But all I suddenly care about is this man, at once alien and familiar, whose shape I recognize only as that of my own desires.

And then a wonderful thing happens. One of those pieces of paper reaches me, and I hold it, and I learn I am to sign my name upon it. As I freeze, paralyzed by the lack of a pen, this half-made man turns, and from his fingers materializes a pen. He says nothing, but his face creases in a half-hidden smile, and I take the pen from him. As I sign my name upon the sheet, the black letters surface upon its whiteness, and when I finish he is waiting, waiting to receive his pen back. As I hand it back to him, he gives his name, asks mine, I answer, and with that one simple exchange a complicated invitation is issued and accepted, and he is brought first and fully into this land of possibilities, a man with an unreadable expression who now turns away. And once again I am traced slowly.

It is the middle of 2001, and still his face remains shrouded in blankness, even as his body and character are being drawn with the wavering and possibly erroneous lines of my experience. I too am a piece in progress, lost once and now being found again, sometimes black upon white upon black, but sometimes simply black upon white.