By Soramimi Hanarejima (ART BY KJ HANNAH GREENBERG)
June is at its end. So on this warm evening, in keeping with the schedule we’ve settled into, we sit on the sofa in your living room and partake of the secret you’ve selected. Given its age and mine, this one feels legendary yet immediate.
It starts on a Tuesday night in an old apartment in an industrial city I have never visited, with you at your desk and Mom in the bedroom—before she was Mom, when she was only Virea and not even Viri yet.
On a sheet of memo paper, you began writing equations. Three lines down the page, your pencil seemed to have hit its stride. Skating and skipping along bright white lanes bounded by light blue lines, the graphite tip swiftly forging ahead as though following an invisible path already on the page, one that would end at the solution you sought—the answer to the question incited by the word “kindred” in cell A27 of a dream surrogacy spreadsheet.
What dosage of rememberant would facilitate the recollection of just enough good memories to produce nostalgic reminiscing?
That stray curiosity wouldn’t leave your mind, and soon, you were tracking down the relevant pharmacological information then poring over it to gather fuel for the mathematical journey your mind and pencil were now making by the light of your desk lamp.
Three-quarters of the way down the page, you arrived at a single digit: 2. The number of pills you would need to take from your uncle’s medicine drawer. Thankfully, a quantity small enough to go unnoticed.
Several days later, you were standing at the kitchen counter, long after Virea had gone to bed. Slowly, you ground a pair of pilfered pills until they were a topaz powder, a pharmaceutical silt you then stirred into the honey she used to sweetened her coffee and tea. As you watched the pulverized medication disappear into the amber goo, the resistance of honey against spoon was eerily distant, as though you were shrinking away from the moment, to retreat back to the mundane reality you had left behind just minutes ago.
And though you could have discarded this jar of honey and gotten a new one from the cupboard, you didn’t. You pressed onward into this new territory of your relationship with Virea where you would continue to follow the math off the page.
Time to find out where this plan takes us, you thought. Otherwise, you and I are each heading for separate futures.
The next morning, Virea was making oatmeal at the stove while sipping coffee from her confetti-motif mug. Furtively, you glanced at her as you prepared some toast and set out the jam.
During breakfast, you casually brought up that leisurely afternoon spent at the Iralta Slough—a much needed respite after the taxing one-day drive across the Alpine Plateau, that straight shot through a landscape of evergreen shrubs part of a demanding road-trip itinerary only the zeal of youth would devise.
“Those sea otters around our canoe were maestros of buoyancy,” you said. “They made being aquatic look so easy.”
Virea smiled briefly. You wanted to mention more, to improve the chances that the rememberant would aid vivid recall of those sunny, wanderlusty days. But you didn’t want to risk irritating her.
After several spoonfuls of oatmeal, she said, “With all their effortless swimming and diving, they were like mythical creatures passing through our world. So adept at moving from one realm to another.”
You nodded, encouraged.
Work that day was merely more spreadsheets and reports, the familiar tedium allowing you to become preoccupied by uncertainties about your plan.
What shifts in her behavior mean the rememberant is working? If there aren’t any noticeable changes, should I mention the good times we’ve had more often? Or less frequently but with greater detail?
In the evening, with the pretense of making a sandwich for lunch the next day, you stayed in the kitchen as Virea brewed her nightly tea. Slowly layering mayo, cheese, pickles, olives and lettuce, you stood at the counter, ready to deliver the next verbal nudge toward nostalgia: a remark about getting past that pendulum snake as it swung—true to its name—from side to side while hanging from a tree branch angled right into the corridor of a backcountry trail, the snake perfectly positioned at eye level to unnerve and mesmerize her, as though hypnotizing her into a trance of quiet fear.
Still stirring her tea, Virea surprised you by saying, “I was thinking, it would be nice to hike in Brundele Canyon one of these weekends.”
With that, you knew your plan was working.
And you made sure it kept working, regularly mining the past to bolster the present and build a case for a future together. Even after the jar of honey was empty.
If Virea had been—as you feared—on the verge of leaving, then your transgression almost certainly pulled her back into the life you two had been fitfully making together, perhaps by restoring a certain trust. Not trust in your words and actions, but trust in the foundation and promise of the relationship.
The ambiance of enthralling revelation evaporates. No longer a part of your life sequestered from the world, the secret is now simply a story. One that’s part of the larger story I’m familiar with.
“How many do you have left?” I ask.
“Enough to last all the years ahead of us,” you tell me.
Is that good? Your secrets have brought us closer together now that I’m able to relate to them, but among those that remain, will any push us apart for whole days—or weeks—in those years to come?
Like your past self lacing Mom’s honey with memory-stimulating meds, we can only head toward the future, in the direction we have set ourselves upon. Building, I hope, a particular kind of trust along the way.
Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices for Coping and whose recent work can be found in Lunch Ticket, Cheat River Review and The Normal School.
KJ Hannah Greenberg tilts at social ills and encourages personal evolutions via poetry, prose, and visual art. Her bold, textural, colorful images have appeared in various places, including, but not limited to: Bewildering Stories, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Les Femmes Folles, Mused, Right Hand Pointing, Stone Coast Review, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Front Porch Review, Tuck, and Yellow Mama. She uses her trusty point-and-shoot camera to capture the order of G-d's universe, and Paint 3D to capture the chaos of her universe. Sometimes, it remains insufficient for her to sate herself by applying verbal whimsy to pastures where gelatinous wildebeests roam or fey hedgehogs play. Additionally, her art is featured alongside of her poetry in One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021).