Never and Forever :: South!

The little tablet leaves a powdery snail trail on my tongue. I can feel each little grain dissolving there, and I try to really drown in the pleasure of the feeling. I know that at the rate I’m going, I’ll be out within the month, and so I’ve tried hard to stay in this world for a while. But now, now I can’t take it any longer. I have to escape. Carrying these tablets around in my pocket is like being given a key as a child, and knowing that the box which it unlocks carries the most wonderful things, but being told by your mother that you can’t unlock it. And you try to resist, try to be good, you really do, but ultimately the key takes over your mind and you have to do it. Only, for me, there’s no immediate punishment for unlocking my mind, only somewhere in future’s vapour where I know I will regret not hanging out just that little bit longer.

---

“How can you not remember, Owly?” Ambrosia said, voice sing-song. “Remember the garden? And Cissy? The pink dog, remember?”

I try. I try really hard, and I can find something pink and fluffy, although it might have just been a dessert. But there’s no house there. It’s like I have a migraine in my memory, and most everything before we left the Capitol is just a blur of very basic colours. There are no parents or house or memories of friends, just snippets cut at random out of a glamor magazine. There’s a necklace though- a locket that holds what looks like a real, tiny rose, and even smells the same. Someone- I’m not sure who- fastens it about my neck. I can see the gilded bottom of a mirror, but when I look up to see my face, I get shocked back to the future.

“Owly? You’re here, right?”

“What?” I say, still deep in the muggy shards of memory that I am trying so hard to never let go of. “Oh, yeah, I’m clean.”

“When was the last time you ate?” she said, and I think back to yesterday, only it isn’t there. There was a pill when the sun had not yet crept past the treetops and a mix of yellows and pinks and then here I am. And the day before that is the same, only with blue-greens and the day before that and so on, a spectrum of colours being all that I can remember for the whole of my life.

They all think I’m stupid. They think that it’s the drugs that are ruining my brain. But they are what makes my brain- their influence is the only thing that keeps me sane. When their hands are placed firmly on my shoulders, it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the colours of the curtains in my room, nor the last time I had a drink. I’m not stupid, though. I never was affected by the pills when I was a child, and if it were them that stopped my mind from seeing back, then surely I would be fine to see my infancy. But no, that period of time is more invisible than any other. It’s not the tablets that have ruined my mind- it’s time.

---

Soon, the colours have kicked in. The world is an antique-leather-red and the porcelain blue of an infant sky. They make me smile, because they’re so good, so beautiful. One of my sisters- I can’t tell which- says something to me, and I don’t know exactly what it was but it propels my body into the forest. I get lost in the timelessness of it all, because here nothing matters. Here, infinite isn’t just a concept, it’s everything. Here, the milkweed meadow I find myself lying in, cold fingering my back, tells me that everything is going to be ok.

Why do I even care about my memories? They don’t affect who I am now, who I am in this very moment. Their lack of presence has not broken me, only made me stronger. Here I am strength, a metal pole running down my spine. I’m just a butterfly who cannot use her wings, but I am every bit as beautiful. It’s not as if butterflies lives matter, anyway. They’re here for an assortment of months, and then they die, coming and leaving with nothing. A butterfly, a bird call, melted butter in a frying pan- I am nothing.