Remember (3 page)
Authors: Cristian Mihai
After
that, I packed my bags and left the city, the country, the continent. I tried
to put as much distance between me and her.
That
was ten years ago, and it was the last time I saw Alexandra, my beautiful and
tender dream.
A
long time ago, when I was a kid, I used to keep a diary. And every night,
before I would go to bed, I would write down everything that had happened to me
during that day. And I pretended to write a letter to a friend, someone named
Dexter. That’s how you got your name, my friend. How pathetic am I? I have to
write a stupid letter addressed to no one, because I can pay people to smile, I
can pay them to listen, but I can’t pay them to care. I am worth several
million dollars, Dexter, and even though you don’t exist, you’re the closest
thing to a real friend I ever had. After one month of writing daily, I gave
up. I’m just lazy, I guess, or maybe I found no use to writing down the events
in my life as they happened.
To
be honest, I completely forgot about that diary until a few days ago, when I
stumbled upon it in one of the drawers of my desk. I thought that it couldn’t
do much harm if I read it. And so I found out that I couldn’t remember the
events that I, in my own handwriting, had described. Of course, I was able to assemble
a vague illusion of those memories, in a way you’d put together a puzzle. I
took certain elements from memories that were still vivid inside my head; the
way I used to look like when I was a small kid, the places that were described,
the people that I had described, but in the way I remembered them, slightly different
from how they were described in my diary. After a few minutes spent on playing
and replaying and changing my memories as to follow the precise order in which
those small glimpses of my own life had been written down, I felt almost
content with the end product. There was a gentle, fog like perception that
mingled with what I thought of as being a distant reality, but it felt that
those words and what they described still belonged to me.
The
next day I started reading the diary again. And I realized those words, places,
events, and memories were no longer mine. They were cold and empty, just words,
and no matter how much I tried to put the events back together, they still felt
alien, as if they had never belonged to me in the first place.
This
is what Alexandra has become to me. It’s been more than ten years since I last
saw her, and all I can remember are her blue eyes and her long, black hair.
And, of course, the bizarre perception of her being, for most of my past, the
most beautiful woman in the world. I am afraid that if I pass her by on the
street, I might not even recognize her. She’s slowly fading away, like buildings
on a misty day, she’s slowly turning into a ghost, and I fear there’s no way of
stopping this insidious process.
If I try hard
enough, if I really concentrate, I can almost feel my lips burn, a vague
sensation caressing my skin, nothing but a faint echo, but I do know this is as
close to completely forgetting everything about her as I’ll ever get. This is
something I can write down so I will remember.
Cristian
Mihai (born 25 December 1990) grew up in Constanta, Romania. And he’s still
growing up, or at least trying to. Sometimes he writes. Sometimes he gets lucky
and writes something good. He can’t, however, draw a straight line. No matter
how much he tries. Not even with a ruler. And, please, don’t ever ask him to
sing.
Visit
him at
www.cristianmihai.net