I Heard Once

Once. Twice. Thrice.

I heard once about a girl who could turn memories into objects. Not like a picture of that memory, for a simple camera could do that. This girl could turn any memory into something special. A memory of a sunny afternoon in a field of wildflowers into a butterfly that always flew around you (yet never flew away). She could turn a memory of yelling and crashing and the feeling of hopelessness as you saw your mother for the last time into a piece of paper (if you bothered to read the lyrics you would see they were of a lullaby she used to sing you) which you could then burn. You wouldn't forget it, nothing can make you completely forget a memory, but it would hurt a lot less. Many people get their wedding turned into an object, the birth of their first child, things like that. Trauma victims are told to get what haunts them turned too. I wasn't going for any of those reasons.

"Hello?" I step into the warehouse, my voice echoing throughout the room. Some people find her in an apartment, some in a park. They say she always changes where she goes. They say you have to go where she went last to find her. I was answered not with words, but a seeming hum in the air, dipping up and down like music. I knew immediately that I had to follow it, find its source. Was this how everyone else found her? I found my eyes instinctively had closed, but when I opened them the music seemed to disappear. I closed my eyes again and heard it once more.

I did not know how long I walked, how far. I tried counting my steps and tracking my turns but I lost count after the first few hundred. I didn't open my eyes, afraid that if I did I would never find her again. I had to find her.

"Stop." There were hands on my shoulders and whatever said those words was so close I could feel their–her?–breath. "You may open your eyes now."

I didn't know if I wanted to, but I did nonetheless and the sight made me gasp. Had I really been walking long enough for it to become night? Above me were millions of stars and I picked out all the constellations I knew. I saw the sea crashing against rocky cliffs that extended seemingly to those stars. Before me was a girl with red hair that went every which way and I was right, she was so close that her nose touched mine when she giggled. I took a step back to try and get some form of distance between us but slipped on the round pebbles beneath my feet. My hands got a little scraped up when I caught myself.

"Hello!" She was no longer whispering, the exact opposite, her voice almost hurt my ears with its volume. "You found me and wow, I love the location you chose!"

"Location... I chose?" I knew this place, of course, I had visited once when I was little, during the phase when I wanted to be a mermaid. Everyone had phases like that.

"Of course!" The girl took my hand and spun me around, almost making me fall again. "I just followed you until you stopped." I hadn't noticed it at that point, but I had stopped for just a moment. I had heard the singing stop and had gotten worried but I had been about to start walking again. "You're Amelie, right? What memory do you want me to turn? I can do it right now, it'll only take a moment!"

She was bouncing around and I blinked as I watched her. "What's your name?" I needed time to think. How did she know my name? What memory did I want? The girl though, she looked at me as if I had three heads, which I somewhat wished I did. Perhaps I could come up with an answer more quickly then.

"Does it matter?" She puffed out her cheeks and rolled her eyes. "Memory. Which?" It confused me, a girl that knew so much about so many other people didn't want to reveal anything about herself.

"This one." I decided. I didn't really have any memory that stood out to me. She seemed to go from annoyed to just as confused as I had been.

"This... one?" She slowly nodded and took a few pieces of string out of her pocket. They seemed ordinary, but as she twisted them they somehow became dozens of bright, small stars. I couldn't do anything but watch with amazement as she grabbed my wrist and seemed to tie them around it, them spinning them so they would star orbiting around. "There, now get out of my face!" They were harsher words than I thought she could create, but seemingly against my will I turned and started to walk to the bus stop. I turned back once but she and her brilliantly red hair were gone. The bus driver didn't ask for a fare, and I didn't mention it.

The next time I saw the girl was at a performance, my little sister's choir was singing in a church. I wasn't even religious, but I was there to support her. No one else seemed to notice the old man with the cane walk in and he didn't seem to notice them. They didn't notice the red haired girl—though I should stop calling her a girl, she looked the same age as me—bouncing around him. I waited until the man turned to walk away from her to grab the girl's shoulders like she had to me. "Stop."

"What?" Her bright look turned to a frown, though I noticed a tinge of confusion in her eyes. "How– I thought I told you to go away."

"You did." I stared at her until she looked away from me and puffed her cheeks out again.

"What do you want?"

"I want to know your–"

"No." She cut me off and I was too startled to even be upset about it. "What memory do you want?"

It seemed this was what she dealt in and this only, but I was okay with that. "This one." She pulled out more bits of string without even looking me in the eye. I watched them disappear as soon as she tied them around my wrist. I went to complain but she shoved me forward and she was gone by the time I opened my eyes. How lousy of her, to pretend to make me a special bracelet then to have it disappear.

It was only at night when I realized. I put my arm under my pillow and was lulled to sleep by the hymns my sister and her choir sung earlier that day. Underneath I could almost hear the sounds of that girl singing, the singing I had thought led me to the pebble beach but now wasn't so sure.

The third time I met the girl was the morning after a party and I thought she was a hallucination of my hangover before I realized hallucinations aren't typical symptoms of a hangover.

"I don't know my name." She started as she pressed a warm cup of coffee into my hand—it was perfect, three and a pinch teaspoons of sugar and a dash of cream—and started to pace around my tiny kitchen. "I don't, ok? And I don't have any memories of my own, just everyone else's. Why do you care so much? Just leave me alone, ok!" The girl broke down in sobs at my kitchen counter and I was really not awake enough to handle a sobbing woman. Still, I moved closer and let her cling to me like a koala.

"Make some memories with me." I don't know what made me say it but it made her stop crying, which pleased me. I had already made it up that a girl like her should never have to stop smiling. She seemed to protest but I smoothed down that wild red hair and it calmed her. "Let's go to the movies." I took her hand and once again she followed me.

Slowly the people stopped seeking out the girl who turned memories into objects, they could never find her.

Slowly, my wrists filled up bracelet by bracelet.