Short story Creative non-fiction, excerpt from “Disconnect”
My mother is strapped to an inclined board and placed in front of a TV that’s flashing some meaningless ad, selling something she’ll never be able to use. Even if she could see the set – they’ve misplaced her glasses again – the drugs would prevent her from focusing anyway. I burst into tears at the sight of her and start yelling at staff – what the hell have they done to her? Where’s the doctor? Where is my mother’s brain?
The nursing home staff spews answers. She’s hard to control, they tell me. She kicks out windows and runs away. The drugs help her be less anxious and she struggles less. She’s much better off this way, they say. Yes, I can see that: now all she does is drool and moan. Yes, she’s certainly better off as an empty carcass that can’t remember me or what day it is.
My mother lost track of her memories over the course of a couple of years and modern medicine couldn’t help her find them. It seems that medical professionals looked, just as my mom did, in unrelated and irrelevant places, wandering around in confusion, hoping for chance discovery.
But we don’t lose memories, we just lose the ability to connect with them. While no one has actually been able to log where memories are stored, it’s commonly thought that bits and pieces of a single memory are stored in different networks of neurons around the brain. When we need to remember that specific memory those parts are pulled together. So the pieces don’t just disappear, they simply get tucked into a mental storage drawer. And there is a path to those misplaced memories.
I know where my memories are. They loiter the dark, scary streets of my mind, lurking behind shadows of what I did, crawling through crevices of what I think I did, and crouching behind blackened bushes of what I wish I hadn’t done. They jump out, bumping into each other and frightening me as the streetlight of reality brings them into clearer focus.
My memories have begun to creep into my life more frequently as I near the mid-point of physical existence. For me – a person who has always moved too fast, never looked back, eye on the horizon – it’s a hard reckoning. They sweep through me like flash flooding, leaving me shaken and trembling, sweating, gasping for breath. With them, they bring hidden passions, submerged desires, dark secrets. They haunt my nights and punctuate my days.
They are often triggered by a sight, a sound, a taste, but more often than not, by a smell. These memories, these ghosts of living shards, are carried on the hint of an aroma, the whiff of a scent, the blast of an odor. My senses are all heightened in this phase of my life but smell is the one that I can’t ignore or push aside.
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