Remember Me

4

I looked away from Seren, as if I was worried that the sharp fragment I had just released from my mind might have displayed the things that I still wanted hidden.

The truth of it all weighed heavily on my chest, like an anchor pulling me further into the depths of my own mind. My mind was the ocean. I knew that now.

There was no other way to describe it. It was only the ocean. If I don't tread the water, I drown. If I don't float, I sink. If I don't look for the surface, I find myself at the bottom.

I took a sip from Seren's bottle, feeling the burn of the vodka chase away some of the salt water inside me.

"I think I need them to remember me," I repeated, more to myself than to her. The words felt like a confession, a truth I had been avoiding.

Seren nodded, her eyes half-lidded from the alcohol but still fixed on me with a kind of understanding that was rare. It was an understanding I had never quite seen before. She knew my words and what dangers hid beneath them.

"I get that," she said quietly. "It's like... if people remember you, then you mattered. Then you weren't just... here."

"Exactly," I whispered, my voice was almost lost in the night air. "I don't want to be just another person who came and went. I want to leave something behind. Something real. Something beautiful."

She sighed, the sound marked by surrender. "Sometimes I wonder if that's even possible for someone like me. People who feel too much but show too little."

I studied her, seeing the same shadows of doubt and pain that I had been battling. I felt bad that knowing this knowledge comforted me. It's not like I wanted her to be drowning, of course it wasn't that I enjoyed seeing her pain.

But, I suppose it felt like knowing you're not all alone in a pitch black room.

"What do you want to leave behind? What kind of beauty?" She asked me, breaking through the constant monologue of my thoughts.

I stilled, shaking my head. I reached back for the bottle, bringing it briskly to my lips and letting the bitterness distract me for another second. Seren didn't urge me to answer, she was as still as my mind was as she waited.

I searched in my mind for words to answer her. And, I realized I didn't really care about answering her; but the question was something that I felt was owed an answer. Again, not to her. To myself.

"Is there beauty still left in the world to create? Or, has all the beauty been used up?" I asked, the words escaping my mouth like a plea to anyone who knew the answer.

I flicked my eyes back over to Seren, who now had her eyes closed. But I could tell the moment she absorbed my words. A small look of surprise passed through the muscles on her face, but then — the muscles settled. Acceptance. Did she know I was right?

"Everything feels... repeated," I explained, though she hadn't asked for my explanation. "Even the beauty all feels the same. You see one waterfall, you see another. You see one sunset, you see another. You see one cliff, you see another."

"It's all the same," Seren muttered. "It's always the same."

I nodded in agreement, even though she had her eyes closed and would never been able to see my movement. This wasn't for her, anyway. This was for me. And I knew she felt the same way. She wasn't confessing her thoughts for me to hear; she was confessing them to hear them herself.

"And so what beauty do I have hope of creating, if there's no more beauty left?" I said the words calmly, yet the realization wasn't so calm in my mind.