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3:10 p.m. - September 15, 2001
outline memory
Instead of doing my homework, I've become a slave to this machine. What did you expect? I wrote something for English class about Los Angeles and my grandparents' house. It was meant to be a description of a place that was important to you as a young 'un. This wasn't particularly important, but it was the only place I could remember the smell, the taste, and the feel of, and who are they to tell me I need my memory back?

--

It was colder there at night than it was here, even in winter... Los Angeles, the commercially infused desert, could not completely hide the nature from whom it grew. Desert dust and choking dry air blew in the window during the day and coated everything in the room with a thick layer; at night the eucalyptus trees smacked the walls with a whip-like sound. The bed in which I slept was wedged between the raw wood walls and an old dresser. I only fit on that bed until I turned nine and surpassed five feet; when I finally moved the dresser away, uncovering clouds of dirt and dust that had probably been there since my grandparents moved into the house.

The trio of lights above my bed flickered on and off only when they wanted to, and the switch, when touched, would sometimes give off a spark. It discouraged users from disrupting the lights' mystical patterns. My grandma only painted plants, skylines, and naked people, so the paintings hanging on the wall and over my bed flickered in the lights' erratic shine and gave my nights strange dreams; dreams of statues, and the Garden of Eden, and sacrifice, all orange-tinged in sleep.

Every other family on the hill had dogs, and one had a rooster, all of whom would orchestrate noisy compositions thoughout the night, giving my dreams distorted animal sounds as well. I would sometimes wake up coated in desert dust, and twisted in the nighttime quilt that seemed ridiculous by morning. The temperature was known to fluctuate more than 50 degrees fahrenheit between night and day. I would drift off to sleep shivering, with freezing extremities, and wake up eight hours later bathed in sun, sweatily struggling to elude the blankets. Los Angeles tried so hard to separate from its desert roots, and never quite made it.

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Ten points to anyone who can guess who I'm talking about in this next memoir. If you know him, you'll know. Who else basks in pain and avoids consolation?

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The first time I saw him I was preoccupied, trying to find someone else, trying to elude yet someone else. Instead I found him, in the form of a sudden crash around a corner and then the sound of screams. I dashed there, heart in my throat, propelled by the suddenness of the quiet that filled the hall soon afterwards. And there he was, in the narrow hallway behind the theater, sprawled on the floor with a full loading cart toppled over on his rib cage and his wild mass of gold curls spilling out on the tile floor.

At first, I didn't notice the blood. The face was too calm, the slack lips, the lustrous green eyes. I heard sharp intakes of breath all around me, but it wasn't until someone rushed to pull the cart away that I saw the ripped green shirt, the jagged cut, the welling and spilling of blood. We ran to help him, but he backed away. He just knelt there, dipping the fingers of his left hand in his own blood, helplessly.

It was like we were in a time warp, and I still can't explain why nobody moved. We watched his shirt soak through. He looked at us wonderingly, stood up painstakingly, and began to walk away. Somebody put their hand on his shoulder, said they would call the nurse for him. "Don't," he yelled, spinning around, throwing the hand away from him with an inexplicable panic. They stopped, frozen. We backed away. He surveyed us, a tight knit group staring, and walked back through the halls to the drum room, slamming the door behind him.

I saw him three periods later, limping, holding his side, that same bloodstained shirt hanging limp. You could see the outline of his bones.

 

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