Can’t Forget What’s Hardly Remembered                          

I could be any age, with anybody across from me in the ugly cracked leather booth with the same sports memorabilia hanging from the same yellowish white walls, with the same server from the same family that owns the same old space that roofs the same drunks and same last names looking for salvation from the mundane sameness of a small southern town. I’m with the same girlfriend, who I can hardly stand but can’t hardly live without— who saves me from illusions of samsara, who distracts me from thoughts that aren’t my own.  

“What’s your problem now,” she says. 

“Why do you always think there’s some problem when I won’t drag on with bullshit.” 

“It’s that look on your face, that same old look,” she says sipping her Sprite, “I hate it.” 

“Describe it to me,” I say, putting up a finger to the glancing waitress. 

“It’s like you hate me.”  

“Ahh, I forgot that I’m supposed to keep that to myself.” 

She’s messing with the straw in her soda cup and I’m looking into her blue eyes that aren’t getting up from the table and her fake blonde hair reflecting the warm light of the half empty sports bar. My mind is full of thoughts that aren’t my own again. The waitress brings another Budweiser over and I hand her the empty glass beside me. She’s the mother of two and has been working here for hell too long, she smiles softly and looks at a scene she’s seen too many times over and we don’t bother with the same reworded conversation.  

“Isn’t there something I deserve to know?” 

“What are you talking about?”  

“Elijah, we both know you're hiding something,” she says looking up and into my being. 

“I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

She breathed loud and slow, her eyes glossed and baggy, her slim body slouched. I decided to speak. 

“You spend too much time in your head, you create this false reality and build on it through your own misconceptions built on insecurities and go on answering yourself, creating meaning out of fear and blaming—”  

She grabbed her purse and tripped over the wobbled leg between the booth as her short body moved to wherever she might be going. 

“Yo, you gotta drive me back, let me pay the—” 

“You really are as insane as everyone has been saying you are,” she said walking out without looking back. 

I sat in that same ugly cracked leather staring at the same yellowed wall, the signed Steve Smith Jersey, the unwiped small window and the smokers sitting sadly outside while I’m overcome by a false reality that I’ve created, knowing to be what everyone else is too ignorant to understand. 

✰✰✰ 

“I need three chicken sandos and two chips,” Chop yelled as I walked through the back of the kitchen. 

“HEARD,” the chefs collectively returned him.

I walked through the maze of sweaty stressed men frying and burning meat, some greeting me with resentment, some with a yellow grin. My shoes stuck to the greasy tiles as the smell crept into the white T-shirt around my torso. I clocked in through the phone and met the head chef's hand with the interlocking four fingers of mine.  

“What’s good wichu Ja,” Chop said, looking into me through his dark irises. 

“Same old shit, same old shit.” 

“Did you have a fight?” 

“Nah not in a while.” 

“Did you take something?” 

“I tripped a bit ago, I don’t remember really when.” Someone shouted something from the kitchen. 

“Ima talk to you later Ja,” he moved from beside me and started yelling into the back something that wasn’t quite English.  

I walked to the window separating the kitchen from the rest of the bar which was a poorly lit and an almost windowless space where the smoking ban was ignored, and the patrons walked in sad and left sad. The inhabitants of the space had mostly unshaven faces, faded tattoos, missing teeth, laughter that was full of soul, drooping eyes, lost custodies, lost dreams and maybe no reasons to dream. The bar had been bought and ‘refurbished’ when the last owners ran out of money, the new decor was collections of framed photographs from different attics and basements filling the broken drywall and space that could dissociate the average person searching for solace.

I ran the sandwiches and chips to a sweet old couple watching a re-ran Nascar race in the corner with iced tea and a granddaughter who’s crawling under the table. Another seven of these situations came and went, while I said the same programmed dialogue and wondered to myself things like, “when did I go to sleep,” “my thoughts are so loud that the whole bar must hear them,” “are the tv’s always so loud?” 

✰✰✰ 

However lonely this world gets, I know there will be a ‘97 Gold 4Runner beside this gravel road leading to the river. Parked and empty with a man beside it, empty of thought— with a sustained heart in infinite lifetimes— We’ve met in every incarnation, he knows this without needing to know why—I remember accidently, every time— and he goes on knowing that there’s no reason to have faith in what’s already true. We never talk of God because he is and I am one. 

The sun bounces off the eyes of the tree swaying in the August dew. The hairy mother is wet from the clouds who shrunk in the night. The fella beside the Golden Toyota is smoking from a plastic bottle, cackling with the horny birds looking to get lucky on the orange day. His blonde hair wrapped around his plump head like an angel's hue. We don’t say anything or even meet eyes, he already put fresh green in the gravitational cancer mechanism and hands it to me. I light it, cackle and put the plastic back on the hood of the car. I never noticed the crickets until now, rubbing their legs together in ecstasy, what weird aliens they are— they too come to the river to sustain their lives or maybe they just appreciate beauty–

“Did you sleep here?” I said. 

“Nah, at Brady’s.” 

“Do anything?” 

He grunts inaudible English and extends his arms to the rising orange hues before slouching ever so slightly into the backseat of his own car, laying down and sighing loudly. 

I grabbed the fly rod from the back of my Civic, put it together, tied a poor knot and stood beside the riverbed, thrusting it back and forth, acting like it was a fluid, natural movement, thinking about not thinking. I wrestle with the voice that is different from the one I’m used to and argue with myself until one of the voices forgets that there’s separation. I’m everywhere but beside the river— and my friend too, off in his own world. 

✰✰✰ 

In the friend of a friend's backyard with these goddamn thick red gloves again. I’ve drank more than ten cheap beers, and the shitly strung Christmas lights bounce and spin around the disfigured flesh before me, with his own pair of gloves and his own trail of moments leading up to this one. I hardly know him, hardly cared to. His friends and my ‘friends’ have each bet money on who will put the other outta consciousness.

My memory is a black moonless night. All I remember is his body laying like a gently birthed child, bloody and confused. I walked away from the dizzying string lights and the voices that all became one jumble of duality. I walked to the river and stared into the light polluted stars, seeing the north and a few more I can’t name—  

Waking up to the old Egyptian God and the aliens rubbing their legs together. I lift my thumping head up and around, seeing the Gold Toyota parked behind me on that gravel road. I use some bones and muscles to get up beside the sort of reliable vehicle. 

“You won me two hundred last night.” 

I grunt and grab the already packed plastic contraption, flick the wet lighter. My friend hands me his. 

“When I pulled up a baby deer was licking your face.” 

“You didn’t shoot it?” 

“Om.” 

✰✰✰ 

Smoking cigarettes behind the kitchen again. Chop beside me, and the pine trees in front of us, were standing on their pressurized dead relatives as the grey sun sets.  

“Talk to me Ja.” 

“About what.” 

“Your eyes are the size of Nibiru,” he said, staring into them. 

“I don’t know what happened,” I said honestly. 

“Can I tell you something,” I nodded. “Ja...” His eyes widened and it's the first time I’ve ever seen him serious, “Ja.. there was a time when I disappeared and lived with a family in a cabin in the mountains for nine months. My Mom was worried to hell, my friends thought I was dead. I had taken too much acid, and the trip never ended.” He sucked on his cigarette for a long time, still not moving his eyes from mine, “Look, I just know those eyes and I don’t want that for you, I don’t want you to— to feel like you are alone in this world.” 

I didn’t know what to say.  

“Ja, it was two and a half years ago and the trip hasn’t ended.” 

“I’m sorr-” 

“Just listen, if the hallucinations ever get too bad just drink a lot of milk or eat red meat. Just-”  

He was smoking and moving his eyes to the pines. 

“Just don’t give up, never give up. I’ve messed up everything, I’ve hurt more people than I could ever take back and I-” 

He threw his cigarette into the gravel lot and began walking back into the kitchen.  

✰✰✰ 

“You’re finally awake, ha” the bartender said to me jumping up from a hammock hanging from the drywall. She had heavy brown curly, brown hurt eyes and long legs that were comfortably wherever felt comfortable. I wish I could remember her name, I imagine it’s something beautiful. She’s been working at the bar longer than I have, whatever that might mean– I can’t remember when I started. 

I am on a drug rugged futon, in a room I’ve never been in. The walls are littered with Hindu Goddesses, movies I like and don’t, and posters of bands I’ve mostly never heard of. She was wearing a T-shirt fit for a fat man, I don’t know if she has pants on. 

“What happened?” 

“I don’t think you want to know.” 

✰✰✰ 

I’m driving fifty-five miles an hour up the one lane pass through the Blue Ridges, sometime in the early hours of day. Hopefully not half drunk, gunning the V-6 engine through the empty street amongst the green consciousness beside it, with the awareness of a dalmatian and the reflexes of God, listening to Funkadelic and forgetting that I’m not dreaming. Or remembering I am dreaming- what difference does it make. I’m rolling along the concrete and running from some distant version of myself. I’m ever-present in the only thing I know to exist, this moment, continuous, forever. But what is forever? What is this moment if I can’t imagine it without being outside it? It doesn’t matter. The music is loud and everything is green and we are all alive now. 

✰✰✰ 

When I walked in, my mom was playing the piano. There is one song she plays every time. One song, which I can’t name, it’s old and beautiful, expressing a melancholy that no words can begin describing— there’s a distance between knowing a mother truly, resistant to truth for the sake of sustaining innocence.  

There are tears in her green eyes. When she plays, I feel closer to her than in any conversation, I feel her heart expanding into mine— the world is hurting everyone in its own way.  

When she finally noticed me from the corner of her jade eyes, she jumped and fell out of the safer reality, she laughed a little and looked embarrassed. 

“I didn’t mean to scare you mom.” 

She moved up from the old bench and wrapped her delicate arms around my stupid plump body. She held me like she didn’t want to let me go, I held her like it might be for the last time. 

“Do you want some tea?” she said, moving quickly to the kitchen. 

“No, I don’t think—” 

“Come on, spend some time with me,” she said, grabbing two of dad's old glasses. “What have you been doing? Gosh I have been worrying about you, you never call me back.” 

“I’ve been busy,” I said sitting down on the gray cold couch. 

“I doubt that, really,” she said smiling at me and sitting on the other end of the L shaped thing. “You’re still running around with that girl? You know I never liked her, I never did.” 

“Sort of I guess,” I said, trying not to look into those damn eyes, looking at the white walls of the gentrified home, with only a few family photos and some pictures by the beach mom used to live at. 

“Elijah, have you been fighting?”  

“No mom, I haven’t been in a ring—” she moved her body beside mine in one swift movement. 

“Your eyes, what is wrong with your eyes?” 

✰✰✰ 

In the bartender’s apartment, wondering how long I’ve been here, did I ever wake up? She’s reading to her daughter in a chair beside me. I can’t see straight, deciding not to try. 

“I like that too,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘but what I like doing best is nothing.’  

‘How do you do nothing?’ asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.  

‘Well it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, what are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.’  

‘Oh, I see,’ said Pooh. ‘This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.’ ‘Oh I see,’ said Pooh again. ‘It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering,” the bartender read to the girl of about three, with brown ponytails, big brown curious eyes and a bowl of half-eaten cereal beside her.   

“Hell Elijah, don’t get up so fast,” she said to me now, as I rubbed my throbbing head. “Stay where you are.” she turned to her daughter, “Baby, go grab mommy the brown bag in our room.” 

“Is your friend sick mommy?” she asked, getting up and moving to the one other room. 

“Elijah, do you remember what we talked about?” 

“God, no.” 

“Well, I’ll explain it again. You hit your head. You forced me not to take you to a doctor. You told me you were hearing voices. Elijah, you remember this one thing, don’t tell anyone in this town, anything. Especially someone you love, look it won’t make sense right now, but you keep to yourself, don’t tell your mom, your girlfriend. The doctors will make this worse. You come back here in a week, you breathe and take this medicine. You call me, when things get weird. Know that this will pass. Know that you are loved,” she said this seriously to me, handing me some herbs and kissing me on the cheek. 

“Will the voices go away?” 

“Yes, just don’t fight them.” 

Her daughter was beside me again. Glaring at me with curious owl eyes. “Mommy is love, thank you for being nice to mommy.” 

✰✰✰ 

Overcame by the dense oak forest, hearing the trees, watching the sun seep into the leaves and lying with my back to a thick of grass, feeling the energy move from my hands back into the ground, watching as life passed me like a bus window, carrying me into a future I can no longer imagine, carrying me into heaven while I cling to hell. The trees tell me that we will all die. I don’t feel my body anymore, I don’t feel anything but a higher light, I close my eyes— a river grows out of me.  

✰✰✰ 

“Mom, I just haven’t been sleeping and I don’t know,” I said, letting my eyes get lost in her worry. 

“Why can’t you ever tell me the truth?” she said trying to get closer to my shaking body. 

“I don’t know, I just—” 

“You are the only thing left in my life Elijah, the only fucking thing, and I— can’t keep watching you destroy yourself,” her sad eyes were looking out the window. 

“Mom, you don’t need to worry about me, I’m fine really,” I said, grabbing the room-temperature tea from the coffee table and sipping it like it was some natural, fluid movement.  

“All I do is worry,” she was still looking out at the grey afternoon.  

✰✰✰ 

She lay like an angel half under pink silk sheets. The sun was blushing through the white shutters from her bedside and bouncing off her soft pale skin. I hadn’t slept last night, laying with my body tangled in hers, my eyelids closed but my mind having nowhere to drift to- only further into the black incessant noise, only further into the moment that won’t leave me. I am in the chair beside her desk, rolling a joint, seeking salvation from the incessant dream I can’t wake from. I know it won’t help me sleep but the voices are less noticeable when I’m high and her worry is easier to avoid. 

She must have felt the emptiness beside her, her blue eyes bled into the distance between us. “Come back to bed,” she said half awake. 

“I can’t sleep.” 

She groaned, “Just lay with me.” 

“I have to go Hope,” I said while she rubbed her eyes and began to sit up. 

“Where?” 

“To get help.” 

“Just come to bed, baby you just need to rest. Everything will be fine,” she said again. 

“I seriously need help.” 

“Can we just worry about it later, it’s too early Elijah.” 

I get into the damn bed and wrap my clunky arms around her fragile body. I acted like her fake hair wasn’t getting annoying, I acted like I might know what love is and I didn’t bother trying to close my eyes. Her room is clean like usual but there’s a shirt in the corner of her room, with the sleeves cut off. Where have I seen that shirt? 

✰✰✰ 

 Beside my best friend. fly fishing in the same river, beside the same gravel road. I don’t know if I ever left or if my mind just forgot to remember where I was. He’s hooked to something that isn’t a fish.  

“Fuckin bullshit,” he mutters, yanking out the empty string. “You got any weed?” 

“I gotta joint I rolled up earlier.” 

He says something like bet, and I pull out the beige cylinder from my unwashed pants and light it from the tipless end, twisting and watching as the top blackens and reddens and then sucking, puffing and passing it to him as he tries to tie a knot. 

“Do you know what happened to me?” I ask, while he looks at me with unusually wide eyes. He hits the joint and his eyes move with the smoke. He hits it twice more and hands it back without looking at me again. 

“Shit bruh, you mean at the party?” 

“I think, I-” thought about what I meant and regretted smoking at all, “I don’t know, I don’t remember anything but—” 

“Bruh, people have been saying the craziest shit about you, can’t even lie, like I just be hearing shit but like idunno cause people be bullshittin,” he said goddamn incoherently.  

“Well, what happened at the party?” I handed the joint back to him. 

“Do you want to see?” he said with those wide, weird eyes.

“How the fuck am I going to see what happened at the party?” 

“Bruh,” he closes his eyes, hits the joint and hands it to me, his finger touches mine and a static shock runs up my body. “Hit that three times and lay down in my back seat.”  

✰✰✰ 

The clanking metals, the yelling chefs, the wet floors, the food everywhere and unorganized, the skinless chicken above the oven, the overworked hatred in all their eyes, incessant urgency everywhere— my sleepless mind, trying to make sense of anything. I’m grabbed by the bartender, with lemon juice on her slim tattooed hands.  

“Have you been taking the medicine I gave you Elijah?” 

“What medicine?” 

Someone is screaming from the kitchen, “GODDAM WHERE’S THE FUCKING CUPS?” 

She says something and leaves. The noise is too much. Nothing seems to matter, not enough for me to stick around. I walk unnoticedly to the front door, unlock it and walk outside. I don’t remember how I got there, but I gained consciousness in the front seat of my car outside my mom’s house.  

✰✰✰ 

I’m watching myself, from beyond myself... Reliving a forgotten memory, in bodiless light. 

My body is perusing the crowded room, with a drunken fluidity, flowing through the blending flesh of strangers, in search of something, maybe somebody. The house, hardly lit with colored lighting in awkward corners and red bulbs hanging from a living room with too many people to see the furniture, is one I’ve never been in. The strangers are dressed in baggy jeans, the guys in shirts cut from the bicep, the ladies in shirts either too big or too short, the faces are mostly white and unwelcoming, the music, a replication of others to maximize dopamine. For the first time I see Hope’s face and it’s all concerned with someone else's, a tall brown headed dipshit with a smackable smirk. Elijah sees it too and I move above the body held by the will of prolonging unconscious action. When our eyes meet accidently, her face tenses and her body moves off from the dipshit’s hungry motivations.  

“Hope, yo Hope,” Elijah says sort of loudly while she waves to her other friend and moves from the awkwardly lit corner. 

“What do you want?” she says. 

“I don’t know anybody here, I wanted to talk to you,” Elijah says. 

“How many drinks have you had? God, you’re slurring, you're so drunk,” she says agitatedly as I laugh and move my body to hers. 

“I’m jus tryin to have a good time, I haven’t been countin or anything.”  

“Can you wait here, I- I have to go pee.” 

“Christ, you can’t jus leave me here, I dunno nobody,” I say, still trying to get closer to her unwanted attention. She murmurs something and walks away. I look around, find the backdoor and go outside to the cement patio in front of the fenceless yard. There’s one bright strobe light pointed at the untrimmed trees reaching towards an unseeable moon, there’s one body between three chairs, a familiar one at that but Elijah’s head is dangling like a heavy Christmas ornament, throwing his body weight onto the plastic shingled wall. 

“Elijah! what the hell are you doing here?” 

He or I, (what difference does the goddamn grammar make), looks up at the familiar voice and smiles, it’s the bartender from my work. “Oh yo, what’s up.” 

“You going to tell me why you’re here?” she said again smiling, “Come sit, you can hardly stand.” 

“My girlfriend dragged me here and I don’t know nobody else,” I said sitting down in the holy plastic chair. “whatchu doin here?” 

“My old best friend's friend forced me to come, says I need to get out, but I can’t stand this sort of thing.” 

“Where’s your best friend then?” 

She looked away quite quickly from my eyes and into the thick woods, her lips closed and saddened.  

“She died.” 

“I- shouldn’t have- I'm sorry- do you want to talk about it or- you don’t have to but—” 

“Don’t apologize, I was the one who brought it up,” she paused, I looked away and looked back when I felt her hand move beside me with a cup of water, she smiled again though this time it didn’t reach her honey brown eyes. “I don’t want to depress you or ruin your—” 

“Talk to me, I- it always eases the feeling when you let em’ out,” I sipped from the cup for a while and left a few swigs while the wind swept out the shitty music, “at least a little.” 

“Ok but I warned you,” she said, hitting her Juul and not releasing the smoke. “We had met in college, in some introduction to med-school class or something and- well I didn’t really have friends, I didn’t go out or talk to anyone ever,” her smile grew into her shrinking eyes, “but Maya she would knock on my dorm door- and it could be like anytime, midnight, lunch, whatever and she would just share this light she had. This care I never really see in people, and she would, pull me out of like my head, like I was always so worried and anyway,” she drew in smoke that wouldn’t leave her lungs again, “we became so close, and I loved her, like really loved her, like I hadn’t even known you could love someone or be yourself fully around anyone. But she- stopped knocking on my door and I thought, I thought she had gotten new friends or something. And finally, after a few months she came to my door at three or something in the morning and when she came in, all she was talking about was God, not like the one were taught but this connected nature of the universe and how she— she remembered everything that ‘we are programmed to forget’- she called it awakening but the doctors—” 

Suddenly the glass back door swung open and out popped Hope and the tall dipshit with one arm around her waist. Her hair was messy and her laughter genuine. Elijah jumped up from the chair and the dipshit noticed him before she had, moving his body away from her. 

“What the fuck is this shit!” 

“Elijah baby you’re drunk, Elijah don’t try-” 

“You think I’m fucking too drunk to see whatever the fuck this is,” I too wanted to grab him from my astral body.  

“How are you about to come for me when you're out here talking to some other girl?” she said sternly with the dipshit still behind her.  

“She’s my fucking co-worker and YOU FUCKING LEFT ME, you left me to go get FUCKED by this-” 

“Elijah you’re drunk, just calm down,” the dipshit was moving his hands onto her again. 

“Yo bro, chill, I didn’t-” 

“BRO?” A few other cut sleeved sonsabitches started to walk out from the open door, creeping closer to my adrenalized body. “YOU KNOW WHO YOU BASTARDS ARE FUCKING WITH” 

The dipshit's fat necked friend tried to grab my body and Elijah threw his right fist into his thick cheek before the bartender stepped in front of another goon and began screaming. Elijah threw his head around and we watched Hope being shoved into the back door. As Elijah ran for the door, the fat necked friend shoved him from behind and into the concrete porch. 

Elijah's head sank into the stone and the smack echoed from the shingles. The friends went back inside and closed the door. The bartender carried Elijah's clunky body into the woods, with one hand holding his head and the other struggling to keep up his back. I watched as she lay me in a bed of grass and prayed. She didn’t move her hands from beside her breast. No one opened the door, the music didn’t stop and Hope never returned.