How To Heal A Memory By: Jason Myers I knew this girl once. She was a cutter and she had a tattoo of a unicorn on the inside of the top of her left arm. Way away from the scars and fresh wounds inflicted from her special cutting blade. This girl had the best weed too and I did acid with her once when I was visiting her about the other thing and we were both bored and had nothing to do that day. Besides the cutting and the weed and the unicorn, what I remember most about her was that she took a lot of Xanax and wore a different Nirvana shirt almost every day. Anyway, she was in therapy a lot and I remember her telling me that during one session with her therapist when she was having problems with her moods as they existed in the present because she was obsessing so much about the past and trying to live all the way in her memories, her therapist recommended something that I’d forgotten about for at least seven or eight years until I mentioned the mental health wing I was in once during part one of “My Fucking Journey”. Her recommendation was to take a notebook and write the last thing you wished you could say to the people in those memories like it was impossible to ever say anything else to them again. She told me, “It doesn’t give you closure and it doesn’t mean you’ll never think of those things again or get stuck in them but it feels nice to say those final things even if they’ll never hear them. You’ll hear them and because of that, they’ll exist in your memory and it’s a good way to heal the parts that might’ve broke.” Healing a fucking memory. I love the thought of this. So here I go. NOTE: I will not be using a full name due to me not being the same type of asshole I used to be. For A: I never thought you were a terrible person, I just thought you sucked at being a good one. Here are the facts: You always looked so damn incredible in blue. I know you
know I always thought that but I guess right now, I’m saying that you looked incredible in everything and I wish I’d told you were beautiful more than I did.
Another fact: I saw that note you wrote to yourself a month before it was over. But for real over this time. “Jason hasn’t told me he loves me in twelve days,” the note said. I can tell you that for a moment, it almost worked too. I can tell you that for a night, I felt awful and crushed up about that. But I can also tell you that the second I stepped back into the night before the first of those twelve days began, in an attempt to understand my new kind of assholeness and how I got to be the guy who didn’t tell the girl he was living with and had been with for over two years that he loved her, I can tell you that I knew right then I would never say those words to you again. I love you. You know what you did. I never knew. But that was the night you finally showed up after disappearing for three fucking days without as much as text message to me about what was happening and where in the hell you might’ve gone too. I promised myself that was the last time you were ever going to do that to me. I didn’t have to write a note. That’s the kinda hurt that doesn’t let you forget why it’s there. Here’s the truth: The romance of you, the passion of us, I could still live in that radiance and euphoria, I could still live in those immaculate days for the rest of time. Here’s another truth though: That’s all we did the last year we were together. We spent twelve fucking months living for the memories that built the love between us and never spent a single fucking moment trying to grow that love into anything that might’ve saved us.
This is on you. This is on me. This was our disaster. Mutually made. But always exclusive.
More facts: You’re the only girl my art never came before. I know that’s not the way you remember it and I know you never felt that way but it’s true and there were times when I would’ve given it all away just make sure you understood that. Another fact: You and I both know you would’ve never understood it had I done that.
Our last dinner, our last drink, our last night we were together, I remember sitting across the table from you horrified at what we’d done to the earliest versions of us. I remember the anxiousness and how it felt like my lungs had suddenly disintegrated as I failed to recall those early memories of me and you due to our determined effort of burying them under a glacier of all our ugliness. Those early days felt like another life. I was old suddenly and tired and I know you were too because I overheard you telling your sister that on the phone a few days earlier. We were supposed to be slow dancing in a Paris loft to Al Green records by then. We should’ve been making love on Vietnamese beaches and reading passages from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being to one another at cafes in Prague. We should’ve been putting a crib together and making shelves for a playroom. Instead, we were eating shitty pizza at a shitty restaurant and barely speaking and it had been a month since I’d said that I loved you and I wondered, as I stared at you-and you looked especially beautiful that night too, which was always your fucking genius, your ability to look perfect while everything around you and going on with you was in total disarray and chaos-but I wondered how in the hell those words, “We’ve been so great lately. It’s like it was in the beginning,” could’ve come out of those once precious lips of yours, especially as you were counting the days since the last time I said those three words we’d once meant with such vigorous enthusiasm. You’d blown my mind for the last time. Thing is though, I did still love you. Problem was, just not enough anymore to care that it’d been two days since our last fucking fight. Or maybe I was just too tired to fucking care by then. One last fact: I needed you in my life and I am thankful that I knew you in this world. Time hasn’t healed my wounds but enough time has gone by that I can sort out the pretty from the mess now.
So thank you for all those nights when you demanded that I read you parts of whatever book I was writing while we laid in our underwear, talking for hours-sometimes until the sun came up-about all the ideas and characters. Thank you for all your four a.m. compassion when you were gracious and patient enough to just accept “I’m so fucking sorry” before letting me come inside to hold you and be with you so I didn’t have to be alone. Thank you for all of those smile drenched days, running through the city and exploring the places we always wanted to explore but hadn’t because we needed a perfect accomplice for those kind of adventures and we finally found one in the other. Thank you for trusting me enough to share the deepest and darkest parts of you and thank you for allowing me to trust you and share all the damage that needed another soul who was willing and more than able to accept it. Which you did. And you did it with a compassion and grace that was nothing less than remarkable. And finally, thank you for loving me and thank you for all of those sweet, brilliant mornings when I woke up believing that every single fucking day was going to be the greatest day of my life cos you were burrowed into me with your arm draped across me and your heart tapping against me, a heart that back then didn’t seem capable of ever turning into the icy object it was as we finished eating that night and walked our separate ways. But for good this time.