Beside the pile of concrete blocks and
cements stood frozen the figure of a girl whose mind helplessly drowned in an
eddy of emotions. The dying colors of the autumn leaves painted her ashen face.
The footsteps of the boy whom his voice desperately but futilely tried to reach
faded like an echo. Here she was, pretending she didn’t mind being treated as
if she was a wind, a ghost, a ghoul. In the hush of the dusk she whispered to
herself, “I will forget. Soon I
will forget.”
Slivers
of sunlight percolated the room through the blinds that covered the glass windows.
The alarm went off after just after about three lines of the song. A lithe,
fair-skinned girl in her teens rose from a cluttered master’s bed and trudged
to the bathroom to prepare herself for the day. The swell in her eyes did not abate;
her hair looked more like an enlarged bird’s nest rather than a teen’s hair. Her
head throbbed, her whole body ached. She straightened up in front of the mirror,
heaved a deep sigh and let last night’s events overwhelm her. This would be the
last time that she would have to swallow the pain and accept the gashes in her
throat. Today, she was having Cris erased from her memory.
Sarena
arrived at the firm’s office off twenty minutes earlier than she was expected. The
secretary led her to the laboratory where the process would be done. It was
spacious, the floors were gleaming, but it made her claustrophobic with all the
machines, hospital beds and computers. A small pile of papers inserted in a
folder awaited her signatures and utmost comprehension. Meanwhile, a white,
aged, balding doctor named Dr. Ziak spoke to her about what was about to be conducted.
He then asked Sarena to lie on one of the beds, now only chitchatting but
managing to avoid touching on the subject on why she decided to push through the
operation.
Dr.
Ziak first extracted a drug from a vial labelled succinylcholine and injected it to Sarena’s arm. This
would serve as the muscle relaxant. Next he put her to sleep with a general
anesthesia. He deliberately placed electrodes on her scalp, allowing a managed electric current to flow in her
brain.
Sarena’s right hand and left foot twitched- a
result of her brain experiencing mild seizure. There were two gentle knocks the
door before an auburn haired doctor in her twenties entered the room and faintly smiled at Dr. Ziak. They stood
silently beside each other, their eyes glued on the feeble-looking body of a
lass lying unconsciously on the white sheets. Minutes later, the lass opened
first her right eye, then the left. She did not move for a few moments before
propping herself up on the bed.
“Are you alright?” Dr. Ziak sounded more like
a surprised stranger that had just seen a toddler fell from her bicycle.
Nonchalant, Sarena blinked multiple times at
the auburn haired doctor. She bowed her head and forcefully squeezed her eyes, shot
a glance at Dr. Ziak, subtly asking him what occurred in the short period that
she was unconscious.
“You’ll be alright now, darling.” From across
that serene chamber, the voice of the doctor seemed that of a roaming soul in
pursuit of communicating a verse she has long wished to tell. It was pure, not
unlike the psyche of Sarena at the moment.
Dr. Ziak took four steps towards her and began
feeding her with reminders. She merely nodded in response. When the two doctors
were certain that she could take care of herself, they allowed her to leave.
Upon going home, she recorded the day in her journal and slept the whole night
through.
The following day, Sarena resumed the routine
she established before the operation. She found it indescribably lonely to be
alone, but oddly, more satisfying. Everything was going well until the dreams
she had immediately after the erasing process became recurring and exhausting. She
wrote more frequently, trying to piece those dreams together.
She wrote in her journal:
“A guy keeps on appearing in my dreams. I
know him; I pretty much remember his face. And these dreams aren’t just stuff
going on in my head when I am asleep. They’ve always felt real, like they did
happen a long time ago. I can’t convince myself otherwise. There were dreams of
us hiding behind library shelves to exchange poems while nibbling on cakes I
baked. Us getting lost in a city we’ve never been to before.
I’m fine with them really, but there’s this
dream in which we were briskly walking in an alley. Or maybe I was chasing
after him. I’m not sure. No matter how many times I had this dream, I just
couldn’t paint it in my head perfectly. He stopped and turned around to face
me. So, so suddenly I thought I was going to crash on his chest. There was little distance between our faces. “Leave
me alone,” he breathed out, making sure he paused after every word so he could
hear the words dissolve my insides.
The thing here is, though, I’ve never met
this guy before. I don’t remember ever seeing him for the first time and being
introduced to one another! My life right now is one big mess of strangeness.”
When her sister’s birthday came, the
tradition of baking apple pies and making strawberry shakes to share continued.
That afternoon, she boarded the train going to the town where her sister lives
and there, leaning on the walls in the corner, was the guy in her dreams. Her
face lost all its color and her heart almost leaped out of her chest. She did
not take her eyes off of the guy, carving his face in her head and inhaling the
reality of the moment. A sudden flash of black and white images penetrated her
now swimming head.
The guy
tightened his grip on the girl’s hand, playfully swaying it while humming an indiscernible
tune.
“Here
we are!” He removed the girl’s blindfold and embraced her from behind. No one
said a word for three seconds. The crashing of the waves replaced the hum. The
sun began to leave, as if it waited for them to arrive before sending sparkles
to the sea.
“Happy
anniversary.”
The train halted to a screech. The raindrops
pelted the train’s roof. It was time to walk to her sister’s home.
On the way back to her apartment, Sarena noticed
a kindle huddled in the intersection of walls in an alley. Out of pity welling
up in her, she marched towards the cacophonous kittens looking for shelter and
warmth. Before she could bend her knees to check on the kittens, her eyes were
immediately diverted to the dank, dark alley, to the familiar stony path in
front of her. She remained frozen for three seconds before a seemingly
apparition of Cris assembled beside her. The dishevelled guy with an unusually
sharp nose sped ahead of her, away from her. The guy in her dreams whom she
believes she’s met before, who refuses to be remembered, to be recognized. She became
numb on the pavement. In a vehement splash, what occurred fifteen months ago in
that same ground rendered her knees powerless, dead. The memory of Cris leaving
transformed into being completely her in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Everything else was fog exhaled by people who attempted to connect to the glass
windows of her soul. At one point, she was fully conscious of what she has
conquered some time ago, but she willfully chose to dump this consciousness in
hopes of living in peace.
With tears quickly trying to escape her eyes,
she began running without knowing where she’s headed to. The trees, the people,
the cars, the skies disappeared as the world converted into a blur. Sobbing her way out of everything, she subconsciously
ended up in Lacuna. She barged in, looking for the doctors that operated on her
weeks ago. Dr. Ziak and the auburn haired doctor were on separate tables, the
faces of whom buried in their laptops.
“I had my memory of someone erased, hadn’t
I?” she screamed, still bawling. Dr. Ziak held her shoulders and guided her to
a chair. He moved in front of her and looked her apologetically in the eye. With
trembling voice, Sarena spilled the story.
Afterwards, it was Dr. Ziak turn to explain.
“You had your memory of some guy named Cris
erased through electroconvulsive memory. It doesn’t guarantee eradication
though. Your memory of being introduced to each other was successfully wiped
off. But your breakup, all the other things you remember about him, your dreams
with that guy- they were far too deeply rooted in your consciousness, in your
being, to be erased.”
The auburn haired doctor butted in.
“As the electricity methodically
obliterates the chain of memories, an awfully significant amount of time is
spent on the interference with the storage. I hope you didn’t see it as a
waste. Also, more importantly, the consuming desire to be stripped off of those
possessions is because of your fear of the memories, the fear of continually
being dismembered by the immensity of that collection. In the period of your
life that you endured without him, you somehow internalized the underlying
purpose of the tragedy. Either way, you are left with a void and abysmal hole
in your world. Would the breathing spaces take the place of the vibrant past?”
REFERENCES:
http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/22/erasing-painful-memories-with-shock-treatment/,
March 4-9, 2013
Apple Czarline C. Cruel
2013-5992
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