THE MEMORY EXCHANGE

-------

“What have I done?” 

My voice came out muffled as I lay facedown, my noise crumpled against the fabric of Quinton’s tent floor.

“I don’t have the capacity for this,” Quinton said, his words slurred with grogginess. He still lay in his cot, having failed to get up as I entered, wailing. 

“I broke up with her!” I shouted into the ground. “How could I be so stupid! She’ll take me back, won’t she?” I rolled to look at Quinton, hopefully. He had his back to me, having suggled securely into his sleeping bag. “Quince!” I said, sitting up, and then searched in my pocket for something to chuck at him. All I found was a knife, so I threw it, hilt first. 

He shrieked as it hit him, and then patted about for the object on his sleeping bag, found it, brought it to his face, and shrieked again. “You threw a KNIFE at me!”

“Quincy,” I said, allowing my ghoul teeth to show through, “I have lost the love of my life.”

“You were never together!” He shouted, flinging the knife to the ground. It bounced, landing close to where I now sat cross-legged. “Not only does she not love you, but she doesn’t even like you! I’m….. I’m sorry, but it’s true. And she’s a b-word, anyways,”

“A what?” I said, startled out of my feelings. “A bitch?”

“Er,” said Quinton, “Yes. Say…we don’t have to worry about each other, do we?”

I had reverted to my tail-whipping ghoul form. “Worry about what?” I said, then eyed the cot. “Is there room? I don’t want to sleep on the ground.”

“There isn’t room.” Quinton said firmly. “And…. here you come anyway. Okay.”

“You’re a good friend,” I said, welling up with tears again. The cot took my weight with a creak, and Quinton let out some small gasps of pain as I crawled across him, but I wrote that off as dramatics. Until I remembered my claws. “Oops, careful” I said, doing my best to keep my talons elevated as I curled up at the end of his cot, over the twin lumps of his legs.

“We’re not friends,” he said, with a quiet desperation, but there was nothing much he could do from that position. 

and i think about how crocodiles have been around for way longer than that fingernail and how sharks have been here forever too and how there are sea cucumbers that understand time like an angel would; their ages so astronomically long that i get dizzy looking down into them. i think about my dog, and how i am so fantastically ancient to him (an impossible number, staggering) and how, at the same time, i can order my life in eras of pets-i-have-loved and how my childhood died when my cat did.

and i wonder if the earth does the same thing, if nature keeps time in epochs. if the tree in the house where i grew up said oh a new family and got upset when one by one we all left for college and left behind our climbing and screaming and birdhouses. that same tree collapsed during a bad storm this winter; heartbroken. the whole inside was a hull, shivering and empty. it missed our roof by a whisper, almost like it held itself together so it couldn't pass a hole into the house it's been looking into for years now. the people who took it away clicked their teeth. it was a hundred years old, at least.

there are things that went extinct in my lifetime. there are memories that don't extend to the tip of the finger. four years ago, for the first time: i saw a bald eagle in the wild. ever since they've been sprouting strangely in my life, their origami frames hunched in a racket of brown feathers. something in the motion of wild animals braced against the new england weather - like we all (all of nature, all of the fingertip) have the same shared hate when it's cold sorrow. like in years and years and years of history we never really evolved a better method than to close your eyes and brace yourself against it.

i saw a butterfly today, staggering drunkenly in the early spring air. it's too early for her other friends. i want to tuck her back into bed and say it's not your time yet! her life like a pinprick in my own. in butterfly school they'd have to stretch out their scales and say - at the end of your furthest wing is where you are in the life of a human. she is in my life, isn't she. something about how my heart seized at the sight of her, so brave and lonely and unfair; and how it snowed yesterday (and will snow again, probably), and how, in spite of that, she was out there and flying.

something about waking up this morning and thinking - i'm too old for this. how my hips and knees and back all make new noises. how the other day at a grocery store i picked up the gloves an older woman had dropped, how she'd laughed and thanked me - i can't bend down like you young folks anymore.