The Memory of Past Sorrow
By Jacob Dimpsey
I still see you, Ezra. I see you on the balcony in a cloud of your smoke, a book resting open and forgotten in your lap, your eyes fixed on something in the distance I can’t see. I call your name. You look at me, dazed, as if waking from a dream.
I’m sitting on the floor of my apartment, my back pressed against the wall. I pour a glass of whiskey. Hold it like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. “For relaxing times… make it Suntory times.” You made me watch it with you even though you said it was best to watch it lonely and alone. With you, Ezra, I may have been lonely, but at least I was never alone. I use a Sharpie to mark the level left in the bottle, about an inch below the previous line. I used to note the date beside each mark, but I stopped. I light a cigarette in the apartment, using last night’s empty glass as an ashtray. At one time, my landlord might have evicted me for this. Can you see him sniffing the air as he’s walking down the hall? Furiously pounding on my door, keys jangling from his belt?
Most of the neighbors were evicted when housing costs more than doubled. Their apartments now lie empty. I’m one of the few left who can make rent. It is fortunate, I suppose, that my father died early on, before the life insurance companies went under. Sometimes I look out my window. Outside the building, tents are pitched in the empty streets and parking lots. Families huddle around drums of burning trash for warmth until the city police ransack their camps, and they have to migrate to another part of town. Most of the time, though, I look at the wall. A spider weaves a web in the corner. A fly buzzes too close.
I wish I knew what killed you, Ezra. You never even gave me a chance to save you. You were always selfish like that. That morning, the last morning, you were already awake. Your head was resting against the headboard, your eyes far away, looking at something in the desert outside the window or at a shimmer on the wall. I leaned over to you, ran my hands through your hair, over your chest. You smelled of tobacco and Old Spice. I said, Tell me what you’re thinking. And you kissed me ferociously. Silently.
I take a sip of whiskey and watch the shadows move across the wall right to left, opposite the path of the sun. Memories are kind of like shadows, don’t you think? Shades cast by some bright past that darken everything they touch. Maybe you wouldn’t agree. Maybe, for you, the past was just as dark as the present.
Do you ever think about past lives? my sister asked, passing me the bowl and her pink lighter. No, I said, pinching the bowl and tilting the flame to the singed crumble of buds. Elexis kicked her head back and laughed, face to the stars. Fuck, Will, you must have considered it. This can’t be everything. It can’t be. I never used to think about these things. Elexis was the “what-does-it-all-mean?” type. I was the type who was content to sit and listen. Lately, though, I’ve felt like I have to ask myself these kinds of questions because, now that she’s gone, who’s going to? Often, when I think of Elexis I think of this moment. We’re on the balcony. Elexis is visiting me from California. The wind snatches away the smoke on my breath as I exhale. For a moment, Elexis is almost giddy with the delight of sharing an idea with me. Then her expression changes and her voice lowers.
You know trauma can last lifetimes, Elexis says. Even the Earth feels it. I think about that a lot.
Did you know that the word “nostalgia” was originally coined by a 17th-century Swiss medical student who wanted to diagnose the pain of patients who longed for the past? It makes me think of a line by Goethe that I once recited to Elexis to show her, with some indignation, that I, too, am well-read. Something about recalling the memory of past sorrows. In any case, when she heard it, Elexis smiled in her sad way, and then I felt stupid because I realized it must have made her think of Mom.
I pick at the carpet and the woodgrain of my coffee table. Pulling them apart one fiber at a time. You can’t reassemble such small things. The little chips of paint that flake off the wall, the loose threads you yank from your pants. You can’t untear paper, unburn cigarettes. Destruction is rarely violent. The world outside my apartment is far from violent. When people die, they die quietly. If a sick person collapses dead on the street, you step over the body. You don’t talk about it. You talk about anything you can possibly think of that isn’t it. Or you talk about it in vague terms: “a failure of privatized healthcare,” “the growing shift to automation as labor becomes scarce,” “what the wealthy spend their money on now.” Tell me instead about the war for oil in Saudi Arabia, or the school shooting in another city, or the military coup in Sub-Saharan Africa. Tell me something violent so I don’t have to listen to the quiet death rattle of humanity.
I wonder if there’s a word to diagnose the pain of longing for what never was. Sometimes I play out little scenarios in my head. I don’t imagine us getting married. I don’t think I could bear spending a lifetime with you but, Ezra, I wanted longer than what we had. Yes, there was the bad, and our screaming still rings in the silence of the apartment. When I poured your whiskey down the kitchen sink, you hit me for the first time. The next day, I found you curled up in the bathroom with vomit on your mouth and shirt. I undressed you, bathed you, yet you wouldn’t look at me. But there was also good, though long ago. In your mother’s vineyard in the valley, you told me you loved me for the first time. On the porch, eating apricots and tossing stones, you said it almost apologetically.
This isn’t easy, you said.
Nothing ever is, I said. And I kissed you and I loved that you tasted of apricots and wine.
At my father’s funeral, Elexis eulogized him for both of us. She has a way with words that I don’t. Dad, you took care of us when mom left, and we didn’t make it easy on you and I’m sorry for that. She looked so poised, just the right combination of emotional and strong. If it were me, I would either bawl my eyes out in front of everyone or stand there stone-faced and emotionless. Ezra, by the time you died, the world was so far gone, comforts like funerals were no longer possible for people like us. I buried you myself in your mother’s vineyard, next to where we buried her under the apricot tree. It has since begun to wither as the ground dries up.
Do you wonder what people in the future will say about us? Elexis asked. Like the way we talk about Rome or Babylon, what will people thousands of years from now say about America? Elexis absently braided her hair. It was strawberry blonde like Mom’s, mine was light brown like Dad’s. She used to dye it, but she stopped. You’re assuming there will still be people thousands of years from now, I replied. This was before the plague, before everything. You were asleep in the bedroom, sober. Elexis frowned, I’m being serious, Will. Me: I’m being serious too. Elexis: Then fucking humor me. Elexis undoes her braid and starts over. I huff and pause to think, I don’t know, they’ll probably say What a waste of potential, Elexis said, Or, conversely, It was a shitty place until the proletariat ate the bourgeoisie. I laughed. So, historians in the future will be Marxists? Elexis grinned. I said, I think Berkeley has radicalized you just as Dad feared it would. Elexis rolled her eyes. Then she hesitated and pulled a flask from her bag. Do you mind? she asked. I shrugged and shook my head no, even though I did mind. Not because of you, Ezra, but because of Mom. I knew this was just another way Elexis allowed herself to see Mom in her own reflection. Another way that Mom continued to reach out from the past and haunt us.
For a while, Elexis was into new age stuff – crystals, manifesting, and shit. She told me to visualize the future I wanted, and it would come to me. She told me she was manifesting a class revolution. To humor her, I told her I would too. I visualized your sobriety. Though, in the back of my mind I think I still believed it would be the thing to kill you, but it wasn’t. When it became clear from the news that the plague was here to stay, that it wouldn’t be slowed or stopped until it had run its course, whatever darkness I was able to keep at bay inside you, I couldn’t anymore. That last morning, you kissed me in bed one final time and left to take a shower. A shot rang out in the quiet apartment. I dropped my coffee. I didn’t even know you owned a gun, I thought you were against them. You know, we spent so much time deciding what we were for and what we were against. I try not to, but when I close my eyes, I see your body there on the bathroom floor. A moment that somehow still bleeds into everything that happened before and after.
I remember the Goethe line now: “There would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.” I wonder what Goethe would have made of mankind’s present lot. I haven’t heard from Elexis since the phone lines and cell towers went down. I have every reason to assume she’s dead. Most people are. I haven’t eaten in days. I’m out of alcohol. The shadows on the wall are getting long. At the end of Lost in Translation, Bill Murray whispered something in Scarlett Johansson’s ear that made them both feel not so alone. Is this the darkness you let take you, Ezra? Is this what you were thinking when you kissed me that last morning? I’m trying to imagine a better world, Ezra. I’m trying, but I can’t.
Jacob Dimpsey (he/him) is a graduate of Susquehanna University. His work has previously appeared in Flock, Sidereal, and The Rush, among others. He resides in Camp Hill, PA with his wife and his books.