Snapshots and Elephants

Narrative by anonymous

Snapshots and elephants. These two things have nothing to do with each other, under normal circumstances, but sometimes two things that don’t belong together, come together for a moment in time, only to become unrelated and separate once again.

Snapshots. The memories come in snapshots, bursts of clarity and memory, like an old fashioned camera going off in a dark room. Soon they are gone and I am left with ghost-like sensations, barely there, yet very prevalent. For a moment, before the memories fade back into the dark of my mind, I can almost feel what it felt like to be near him, what it felt like to kiss him. I can almost feel how, when we held hands, our hands didn’t quite fit together correctly – a key jamming into the wrong lock, a puzzle piece scraping over it’s false match – as though our bodies knew all along that the two of us were not meant to last.

Sometimes I remember little things. Like what he was wearing the time I went over to his house and watched movies (a red shirt and khaki-colored cargo shorts and white socks, and the white socks made him look like a child who had taken off his shoes). Like how he smelled every time he was close to me (detergent and general cleanliness, but no one I had ever met or been physically close to had ever smelled like that). But sometimes I remember the things I’d love – almost as much as I loved him – to forget. Like how I was always self conscious of how I kissed, how I was as a girlfriend (and how he only perpetuated this feeling of inadequacy, how he liked it best when I kissed him like She once did).  Like how I would say no (pushing his greedy, clammy hands away from me, but they pushed back, and they won, reaching towards me as I pretended to be okay with it).

Elephants. The pain was like that, like a circus elephant, or two, sitting upon my chest. Crushing my ribs until they poked into my heart. And I was scrambling, flailing, to move, but the sadness, the pressure of the elephant on my chest, pinned me down. I was going to die, I was sure of it, I was going to die, whether it have been of a broken heart or by my own hand, but I had never been more sure of anything.

Sometimes, when I’m near him now, when I sit near him in one of my classes, a little part of me feels that elephant’s tentative pawing at my still-healing rib cage. And sometimes, when he smiles at me – that completely platonic smile of complete innocence of his horrible effect on me in the past – I feel that elephant begin to dig in, like a cat carving out a nest in a blanket. And sometimes, while I’m looking at him, and I’m smiling stupidly, almost forgetting how I once felt, my mind reminds me of his words:

“I’m only perfect because I’m with you.”

And part of me, everytime my mind replays those words, breaks apart again.