Pulling Strings

I'm always impressed when people say they can recall conversations and events as far back to when they were toddlers. I can remember all the birthdays of people who made even the slightest appearance in my life. I can recall my old girl scout troop number as well as the names of everyone in it. I can even recite the lyrics of the cheers I used to chant from the sidelines of football games in middle school. But I still feel as though there are years missing. So much of my life feels like vague events tied together by vivid flashbacks. Some of these images are burned into my skull like a thick, wax seal, holding in feelings that are too heavy to roam freely throughout my body. The rest pop up like strings: Pull here to remember.

I am young, no idea how young or what time of the year it is, and I am in my aunt’s basement in Ohio. My whole family is downstairs waiting out a tornado. The adults seem calm. It’s obvious that they knew everything was going to be okay. I’m playing it cool on the outside but on the inside I am petrified that we are all about to die.

I am fifteen and I’m working as a barista — my first real job. I’ve just made a cappuccino for an intimidating older man. He takes one sip, looks at me, tosses the full cup in the trash, splashing foamy milk all over the wall, and wordlessly walks out the door. He may as well have punched me.

I am still fifteen and I am at my dad’s office just outside of town. We are watching a set of four tornados touch down in the distance, miles away from us and what appears to be right above where our house sits in town. My mom is at home with Sam and my grandma. Scott is trying to call her but the phone lines have already been sucked up into the storm.

I am sixteen now, on the phone with my parents who are a little over an hour out of town. They need to come home right now. There's an ambulance coming. Scott is laying on the floor, convulsing, drenched in sweat. They get back just in time for his final Grand Mal seizure of the evening. I have my brother’s eyes and my dad’s eyes at the forefront of this memory: one set rolling back into his head, the other welling with tears.

I am eighteen and I’ve just woken up in a stranger’s bed, naked with a rolling headache. A toilet flushes from the other side of the bathroom door and I don’t wait to see who emerges. I’ve already gotten clothed enough to flee the house I didn't recognize, running barefoot down a street I’ve never seen.

I am nineteen and sitting on a paper sheet under buzzing, flourescent lights, worried my parents will be able to see my medical records. I'm not ready to explain that the "nice boy" I brought home for the holidays isn't very nice at all.

I am twenty, then twenty one, then twenty two, then twenty three answering a familiar phone call that is going to obliterate another little chunk of my heart. My recollections of each time I learned someone I love has died are so clear that I could write an entire book series on those sets of 60-second phone calls.

I get these clear, fleeting flashbacks that I replay in my head like a catchy song before they disappear again. Of course I have memories of the fresh air that was breathed into my body when I finally, truly fell in love or the sound of my grandma saying “Amy, look-ey here” whenever she’d place a tricky puzzle piece. Of course my temporal lobe isn’t this damp, musty room where I go to brood, but it seems like my ability to hold onto my most disturbing sensations is the strongest of all. I can’t stop pushing the buttons that force me to re-feel these things over and over again.

Bad memories sprout up like strings that are too tempting not to pull… and pull and pull and pull and pull until my brain is scattered into pieces. I braid the strings together and lay them out in the form of writing so that I can bare to look at them. There are so many now, but I like the way they weave together. Every year they're less tempting to pull.