Trial by memory

There’s nothing particularly beautiful about the train station.

I. ARRIVAL

I have walked up and down these stairs nearly every day for the past eight years, yet there’s a gaping absence where gentle memories should live.

There’s nothing particularly beautiful about the train station, nothing really worth looking at. Everything is grey, that cloudy colour that casts a film over your eyes when you’ve barely woken from a long dream. Grey, grey, grey — the most intriguing of the colours, we say morally grey to connote artful complexity, a three-dimensional quality that should be venerated, the peak of a pendulum swing between two extremities. Grey means nothing so celebratory for Glenfield Station.

At 2:55pm on weekdays, a crowd of high school students suffocate the concourse in swaths of royal-blue blazers and pleated skirts. I went to that school. On Tuesdays, a worker sweeps the floors. His cheeks jiggle like pudding and his cropped white hair encircles his skull like powdered sugar. I have not seen him in some time.

Nothing about this place is supposed to stick. What is it, then, to live somewhere without memory? I can recall coming here on winter nights, when a dreary mist blurred streetlights as if God had heaved a sigh, summer days when trees reached upwards in worship, their topmost leaves burnt by the sun, I can even recall a woman attempting to jump onto the tracks one afternoon.

Extracting these images from my mind is a laborious process, requiring the same precision that it would take to separate oxygen from air. They don’t have the same textured quality of real memories — they’re flat, incomplete: a single star penetrating the blackness of a night sky, a hollow in a tree that resembled an eye, a woman’s anguished face when a worker pulled her back from the edge of the platform, becoming a pink pinprick in the distance as the train departed.

I think, after a few years, these images will become obsolete anyway

II. AVOIDANCE

Eyes open, eyes closed. Eyes open: buildings moving past at an alarming speed, whorls of city lights and laughter from girls in sequin dresses standing on the sidewalk. Eyes seeing a dashboard, their lights contrasted against the darkness of the inside of the Uber. Eyes closed: the heart is beating at a soft, regular pace. A dull pain is growing at the back of the skull. The tongue is dry and scrapes against the roof of the mouth.

The back of the car is humid and sticky, a mustardy scent clings to the seats. I madly lower the window as someone beside me confirms an address with the driver.

For a moment I cannot recall ever meeting this girl. I am painfully unfamiliar with her marquise-cut eyes. Then the past few hours come back to me in a spiral, a single strand resistant to forming a whole sphere. 

I recall the frenzied ecstasy that only seizes me when I am in the presence of smiles and bodies, the stark and joyous contrast to the silent house I am returning to. I can recall the music, the conversations with strangers, the exchange of questions and answers like kisses. I want to laugh — not like the people flirting at the bar — but a laugh that threatens to crack open my chest and force all its contents onto the floor of the taxi — because, finally, I too can dance. Somewhere in the city there are showgirls dancing to buoyant jazz tunes, and I am finally like them as half-remembered conversations at parties are pirouettes, half-genuine promises to have lunch the next day with beautiful and impeccably-dressed strangers are grand jetes. I can dance because I am no longer alone. 

The taxi pauses at a stop light. Outside the window, a man busks on the street. A small cat is twined between his legs. 

I do not want these ripples of memory to evade me, though their edges — usually hardened by the edge of reality — have already become soft, vague. Again, like the spiral, the coil has two faces. The face glimmers with tantalising images, but its underside is steeled by the realisation that I am coming home to an empty, silent house.

Once I am back in my bedroom, I will write in my journal. I will write in very short sentences. I will use a surgeon’s precision to retain every detail I can remember. I will falsify certain things, make things appear glamorous when they are in fact mundane, in case I ever read back on these moments. 

To keep the silence away, I will lie.

III. DELIVERANCE

This house of God is a small one. The first time I was here, I did not know how to pray. Standing among several women, I watched their bodies curl forwards into question marks, foreheads pressed to the floor, until their frames were condensed into full stops. So self-assured, so soft for whatever decrees rain from the sky. 

Something about it makes it difficult for me to breathe.

I remember when I used to pray, when I could swear I heard a voice in the thunder and eyes in the lightning. Nature has stopped meeting me since then.

I stand in a house of God, shoulder to shoulder with women and children. They have taken off their shoes and leathery sandals swarm the entrance. They descend to their knees. Their hands tremble. Something moves them, but I no longer know what. I join them anyway. I want to speak with God, want to catch up. 

With shame, I realise I am adept at remembering him at my worst. I am slightly more fickle at my best. Most pertinent is how he recedes from the manner of all things when everything is quiet, steady. The ordinary is too polite for the divine — he disappears from the same bus driver I see on King Street on Thursday evenings, the ducks grazing the pond at Victoria Park, a musician performing at a dingy bar. There is no room for him, but somehow everything still sings. 

I feel it then — that prophecy of air, the monumental leap. Whatever spirit seduces the trapeze artist to loosen their fingers and plunge into freefall finds me now. With hands help up to pray I can ask, why have you betrayed me by making me incapable of loving you?

I think they have lied this entire time — the world stands painfully still with all its shadows and trees, so immobile until we glare and it flinches. That wholeness I am supposed to feel when observing my memories, where is it? In their absence, I resolve, there is freedom. Above the freedom, there is nothing. 

During the car ride home, my mother catches my eye in the rearview mirror. She can tell my mind is astray. She recites, He said, remember me and I will remember you.

With closed eyes I think, whatever may seek me may have me.