I Can't Remember

I can’t remember the details. Remember. A word with too many meanings and too much pain attached to its skeleton frame. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and remembering is too much of a bad thing. No, I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the suffocating silence, his blinding white sterile heart, wiped clean with Comet and dried under a volcano. I don’t want to remember the way he looked at me, his dark eyes a reflection of a million storms. No, I don’t want to remember. I think I’ll stick to watching Gossip Girl re-runs and darting my eyes between the pages of the glossy magazine I’m holding.

I glance down at my nails, frozen, grasping the magazine like a life raft. Bitten like a summer strawberry, my nails are a reflection of my personality, a symbol in my life, as my English teacher would say. This fleeting thought transports me to that day last November. The sky was a mottled array of grey and white hues, like an artist had gone completely insane, Picasso-insane, and decided to paint the sky a depressing mix of sad and sadder. I remember noticing that sky when I woke up. I remember glancing down at the indentation in my bed where he had lain. I remember feeling the cold hardwood floor under my bicep when I woke up to that dark sky.

I walked slowly to my mirror, I was a deer walking on a thin sheet of ice and what I was about to see could startle me and cause the ice to break. Snap. Like my heart. So slowly, I placed myself, eyes closed, in front of my mirror, like I do every night after he’s been here. I position my hands over my eyes. One by one, I lifted my fingertips from their places just above my eyebrows, where I felt it, throbbing. I let them slowly fall from my face, and I stared at myself in the mirror, once again entranced and horrified by what I saw. There it was, clear as a summer day. Anyone would be able to recognize what it meant. But apparently no one I knew was anyone. The purple, red, and black crescent shape bordered my right eye like some careless child’s colouring. The pen hadn’t stayed in the lines, and the colours all blurred together. The bruise was the sky outside- mottled, dark, and sad. Sad and sadder. I remember painting over the unsightly painting on my face with my worn-down concealer stick. I remember the pain of its pressure, how it felt good. How it took my mind off what I had to face today. Him. I remember being half-satisfied at my work, at my careful blending of creams and powders and lotions to make the big, fat, ugly blotch go even half away. I remember not looking at anybody when I walked downstairs, up the street, and into school. I remember finally lifting my eyes from the cheap linoleum floor when I sat down at my desk in my Grade 11 English class. I remember staring at you right in your bright blue eyes when you handed me my homework back from last week. I remember willing you to notice the blue behind the beige, I remember staring at you so intently, hoping that you would finally notice. But all you said when you saw me staring at you was “Good writing, Amber,” as you set down my essay with a big plop on my desk. I remember staring at the big, fat A in red marker on the first page. I remember wanting to scream and throw it at you because it reminded me of dried blood. I remember.

But that is all I remember, all I ever will remember, I think, as I sit here on this couch in front of my flat screen TV, reading a glossy magazine and slowly picking the mascara off my eyelashes, like picking the wings off the butterfly word, remembering. I sit here, sipping six dollar green tea out of a twenty dollar mug, my new bruise throbbing with an almost gentle persistence under my newly-replaced thirty dollar concealer and powder from the Sephora across the street. Of course it has to be the thirty dollar kind, the kind that should say: “Hides perfectly all bruises, marks, and scars from abusive boyfriends” on the label in pink, flowing script. Of course my mom or the lady behind the counter at Sephora should notice that I am buying so much makeup all the time. I haven’t had more than one monthly pimple since I was thirteen. What would I need concealer for, other than for hiding battle scars?

But my mom is too busy click clacking in her two inch black patent leather pumps down the oncology ward of the hospital, fighting back her own tears as she dries the tears on my little brother’s dying cheeks. Yes, she’s too busy with her corporate job and her cancer-poisoned child to notice me, her straight-A daughter with an affinity for abuse. I’m just a six-o’clock on her weekly agenda, a ‘hi, honey, how are you,’ met with the same lie every day, every single day. ‘I’m fine.’

Kyle is what I deserve. When he’s not inflicting pain he’s apologizing profusely, begging on his knees that I will stay. He makes the cut then transforms into the band-aid covering it; he causes my tears then dries them frantically. Some people cut, starve, binge, purge or drink. But that’s a punishment that they inflict on themselves, something they control. They get to play god, they get to decide when they’re guilty. Kyle decides that for me. It’s what I repeat to myself over and over and over and over again until it’s so engrained in my head that I believe every word of it. That this is what I deserve.

At night, I wait. Every night I wait for him to knock on my window. I wait for him to lower himself into my bed after I slide the window pane silently open. I wait for the numbness to take over as he begins doing what he has done for the last three years of my life. Fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, all spent in terror of his wrath. Imagine how much money I could have saved if I didn’t have to buy a new thirty dollar concealer every month for three years of my life. But everything else, I block out.

No, I don’t want to remember. Remembering is a butterfly word with its wings snapped off because remembering is static. Remembering is paralyzing, and if I don’t have to remember, I don’t want to. I’d rather lie under this canopy of mottled gray sky, remembering the reasons why I shouldn’t remember.