The years have pounced, mercilessly, upon us. It is more than my impaired body can stand.
I have ceased to be that idiot girl who believed, in all naivety, that scratching my name on the school’s wooden desks would outlive the body that wielded the weapon: the sharp point of my Art classes’ compass. Yet, that impulse lay buried within me. It was similar to the longing to remember and, in turn, tinged by the dread of becoming an empty space in the minds of those people who meant so much to me.
On more occasions than I would feel proud to admit, I think of those old, worn school desks, where several generations of spoiled children left their marks. It often happened in the back rows, especially during English classes, where the gaze of the headmaster—who came by once in a while for recurring incidents—or the psychotic teachers barely reached. That is why I eagerly sank my initials into the wooden surface. Sometimes, I affectionately entwined them with those of a friend, while swearing that the gesture would remain as the irrefutable proof that our friendship would outlive time itself.
And yet, at other times, I was only capable of urgently and uselessly tracing a single letter, laughing at my anonymity and rejoicing in the pleasure of knowing that no one will ever know who I was.
If I open my heart, then I must admit that everything around me has been tinged by a permanent nostalgia.
That persistence, so animal and wild, throbbing under the pressure of the fear of damaging the dead wood too much, reminded us of the place we filled beneath the fluorescent haze of adolescence and its hormones. There also existed the need for complete strangers, upon inheriting our seats, to wonder who we were as they traced our initials with their curious fingers, thus constituting the irrefutable proof of our existence as human remains in a world that preferred to neglect us.
I always counted on the certainty that I would return and that, by then, I would find our initials still eligible, pouring into my mouth the taste of cheap soft drinks from the vending machines, the sound of doors slamming shut, and that old sense that the world was ours.
What was it that fed that longing? Was it knowing that time, in the end, erases everything? Or was it the mere knowledge that being forgotten is, in any reality, a sudden death?
I chew my memories like a piece of meat, over and over again. They chew me back.
A collection of faces and dehumanizing experiences, spinning my head with no apparent purpose. To remember those people, whom I will never dare to name for fear that my heart will end up withering, is not a worthy rejection. That would require some effort, a muscle that I no longer wish to move. However, I keep orphan details that no longer belong to me: birthdays, the things they loved most, or what their favorite foods were.
My soul writhes with the longing to be remembered with a constancy that weighs heavily on their lives. So they remember who I was before becoming this useless human, dragging my own shadows. So that they wonder, even for a fraction of a second, what became of me.
But it never happens. It never will. And that is the bitterness that corrodes me: how people leave you behind like a mangy dog, carrying the rotten memory of both of us.
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