A Narrow Path

“Sir,” her shrill voice cut through his reverie. “Sir, you have to pay for that sir.” The woman behind the glass was frowning at him and gesturing to the object in his hand. He looked down and realized he was holding a bottle. He turned it over in his hand and read the label.

“Hazelnut” was written on the light brown label in black ink in those old timey kind of letters you see at the fair. He looked up from the bottle at the woman behind the glass. She was gesturing again and her frown had turned in to a glare. “Sir, are you going to pay for that? You either need to pay for that or you need to make room for the paying customers.” Confused, he put the bottle down on the top shelf of the display he was standing next to and made his way for the door.

“How did I get here?” he thought. “Where am I?” He couldn't remember what he'd been doing just before the woman began yelling at him. He tried to think it through, but the first thing he remembered was her voice and the bottle marked “Hazelnut,” and before that, there was nothing.

After leaving the shop he found himself standing on the side of a busy alley. Tall buildings loomed high overhead until they almost seemed to lean in over the narrow stretch of road, and people were coming and going in every direction. He found himself staring up at the buildings, trying to trace the angles of their walls and make sense of their shape when he was suddenly bumped in to from behind. He turned to address the person who had walked in to him, but before he could say anything he was bumped in to again from the other direction. He spun to face the second person as the first hurried past, and that was when he realized that there were people everywhere. The alley was narrow and left little enough room for walking, much less standing and staring at buildings. The press of the crowd was already moving him away from the door to the little shop he'd just left, and rather than try to fight it he settled in with the rest of them and made his way slowly down the side of the road.

While he walked he tried to remember. Anything. Where was he? How did he get there? He reached in to his pockets looking for clues and found a wallet. Without thinking he pulled it out and opened it, only to find that it was filled with small slips of blank paper. It took him a moment to realize what they were, but then it seemed obvious. They were business cards. Small, white, textured cards about half the size of a playing card, but every one of them was blank. He flipped the wallet open to where the ID should have been, but in its place there was just another of the blank business cards. Then it suddenly came to him.

“Who am I? I don't know who I am?” He started to panic then, and might have fallen to the ground in shock if it weren't for the constant press of the crowd. All around him, the bodies of men and women provided a support and structure that was gentle and subtle, yet impossible to withstand. He tried then, as he realized he was being moved along, he tried to move against the current. He turned and pushed and tried to shoulder his way through the throng, but it was no use. He found that if he stood still, he could stand his ground but only in the face of people constantly bumping him and pressing up against him. And every time he lifted one of his feet that pressure would overwhelm him and he'd find himself several feet further down the road. The little shop with the woman behind the glass and the bottle labeled “Hazelnut” was already far away.

He turned then and looked at the direction the crowd was headed in. Ahead of him he saw more of the same. A narrow alley. Buildings that rose up in to the sky on both sides until they almost seemed to touch high above. And people, pressing in on all sides, on there way to some business that was impossible to guess and yet obviously important. He let the crowd push him along, imagining for a moment that if he were to simply lift his feet he could float forever in that sea of flesh. And while he moved down the street he tried once more to understand who and where he was.

It was only then that he realized he couldn't understand the language the people around him were speaking. They seemed normal enough, and all around him he heard the babble of voices. But none of the words made any sense. It was like listening to the radio when it's only loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to be listened to. Words that seemed to almost make sense came to him at random from everywhere in the crowd. He thought that if he could just catch the rest of that sentence, or get a few feet closer to whoever was speaking, then maybe he could understand. Yet somehow, no matter where he turned or how he strained, there was only the constant hum of conversation, without any of the context or meaning that words conveyed.

He thought back to the woman behind the glass. “I understood her. She spoke my language. And the bottle. I could read it. It clearly said Hazelnut.” But he couldn't remember what else it had said. He couldn't even remember what it was Hazelnut of. Coffee creamer? Ice cream topping? Besides that one word, and the black old timey letters on the light brown label, he couldn't remember a thing about the bottle he'd been holding.

“Maybe I should have paid for it after all.” he thought. But then he remembered his empty wallet with it's blank business cards. “What is happening to me? Is this a dream?” He pinched himself to see if he'd wake up, and felt pain blossom on his arm where his fingers twisted the flesh. In moments a bruise began to form on the skin. He tried once more to remember who he was. And then he felt the crowd change direction.

He looked up again and noticed that they were reaching the end of the alley. Where before he could have sword it continued on forever, it now suddenly ended in another of the tall buildings. This one had dark glass hung in all the windows and one of those electric signs over the door that he couldn't quite read. It seemed like every time he looked it was between words, with just the last letters of one scrolling away as the first letters of another scrolled on. He tried to stare at it, waiting for words to cross it whole and give him any impression of what was happening, but for some reason he couldn't seem to focus. His eyes kept wandering away and fixing on other aspects of the building, the stucco facade, the gargoyles over several of the windows, and the tall crenelations high above where it kissed the sky. The more he looked at it, the more it looked like the pictures of castles he'd seen as a boy, but every time he turned to look at the sign once again it was as incomprehensible as before.

He realized he remembered looking at pictures of castles. As a young boy. He tried to focus on the memory, to draw some kind of clue from it, but it was only a sensation. More of a relation to what he was experiencing than a true memory. He didn't seem to have any true memories at all from before the shop.

The crowd pressed him closer and closer to the castle in front of him, and as he reached the drawbridge that had been lowered over the wide moat that surrounded it he suddenly began to feel very afraid. As he got nearer the feeling grew, until it became a kind of terror that made his blood pound in his head and sweat break out over his body. He turned into the crowd once more and tried to press against the current of people. His progress slowed, but he continued to move towards the dark gaping maw of the open gate and the passage beneath the walls and the murder holes above. His terror turned to panic and he began to cry out as he pressed against the tide of people, trying with all his strength to push them aside, pulling at their clothes to move them from his path. But it was no use. They didn't seem to mind or notice, and every person he pulled away was followed by a thousand more. Step by step, he was pressed ever closer to the dark foreboding fortress at his back.

He turned and faced it once more. Above he could see men walking the battlements, and somewhere he heard screams. He looked at the people around him once more, but they had turned into monsters. Hideous and disfigured, their faces and bodies melted and ran before his very eyes, forming nightmarish shapes and then dissolving into a chaotic mess before reforming once more in ways that tormented him on some deep, fundamental level.

“Why?” he cried out. “What is happening to me? Why am I here?” He was almost across the bridge now, and as he looked up he realized that the people on the battlements had stopped walking. Every one of them was standing now, staring down at him. They didn't even seem to be breathing anymore, as though they were all poised, waiting for the next thing to happen. He lowered his eyes to the darkness at the end of the drawbridge and watched as it slowly drew closer. Ahead of him people were passing beyond the end of the wooden bridge beneath his feet and in to that darkness, but somehow it was impossible for him to see beyond it. His panic grew until it was all he knew. He no longer saw the horrible faces of the demons that surrounded him, or heard the babble of their voices. All he experienced now was the gripping absolute terror of what was to come. The unknowable horror that awaited him beyond that dark gate. The press of the crowd around him pushed him closer, ever closer to the darkness that swallowed every one of the people before him without ever growing full. As he inched towards it he braced himself for what was to come. The darkness was almost upon him now, and as the first black rays touched his clothes he felt a cold chill spread through his body.

And then he was through. The darkness was gone. The fear was gone. In it's place, there was a white light, blinding and everywhere. A feeling of warmth. And voices from every direction, but now he could make sense of their words. He understood the song now. The terror that had gripped him only moments ago seemed strange and foreign with his new understanding, and he knew that he could travel in any direction he wanted to go from here. There were no limitations now. Limitations belonged to the man he was before. The man who didn't know who or what he was, or why he was there, or where he was going. Those questions didn't matter anymore, that man was gone, and the limitations those questions placed on him were gone as well. He knew what to do and without hesitation, he stepped in the right direction and out of the light.

He looked down at the bottle in his hand. “Hazelnut,” it read, in blue letters on a white label. A woman was standing behind a counter looking at him. “Will you be purchasing those sir?” she asked. Confused, he shook his head and put the bottle down on the counter in front of him. “No thank you,” he said. He paused for a moment, and then turned and walked out the door.

Something Lost in the Dark

It was dark that night.

He could remember it. The dark. It was the kind of dark that seemed to pour in to you. It wasn't just an absence of light. It was the presence of dark. Palpable. Sensory. He remembered laying in the grass, the oily dark swirling around him like a living thing, waiting for his eyes to adjust. But they wouldn't. Even at the last before he went back inside, he stood there a moment, his eyes straining against the darkness, stretching to find the sliver of light that would show him the grass and the low stone wall and the tree he knew was in the yard and the porch he knew he was standing on. But there was nothing but the endless heavy emptiness. After a moment more he gave up and turned to go back in to the house.

It had been a long night. He remembered that. It was Halloween. He hadn't known her very long, but she'd invited him to come along with her to the party. It wasn't really his scene. Most of the time he preferred the quiet. But he didn't get invited to a lot of Halloween parties by a lot of girls so when she told him she wanted to go he was quick to say yes.

The party hadn't gone well from the very beginning. He wasn't used to these sorts of things and so he followed her lead. She knew the people who's house they were at, knew most of the people at the party. He was the outsider here, and he spent most of his time following her around like a puppy dog. He felt a little pathetic doing so, but he didn't really see an alternative. Inside he was hoping she'd get bored and they could go back to his place. His roommate would be asleep by now, even on Halloween, and he was hoping he could talk her in to spending the night. She'd only ever stayed over once before, falling asleep on his couch while he slept on the floor in front of her. To protect her.

As they sat in the small bedroom around the tall hooka pipe he remembered the way the cotton of her bra had felt beneath his hand when he'd made his first awkward attempt to find her breasts. She'd pushed his hand away, but gently, and he remembered the mixture of frustration and excitement he'd felt as he allowed her to move his hand down to her stomach instead, where his fingers had traced circles on her skin for hours.

They'd been at the party for a while then, drinking and smoking, when he suddenly realized he was sitting alone in one of the bedrooms. Another girl, not the one he'd come to the party with, walked past and saw him through the open door. She paused then seemed to make a decision and entered the room. She sat down in front of him and started talking. He couldn't understand what she was saying. Something about a drinking game. He nodded and smiled and they took turns taking drinks from a can of beer she'd carried in to the room with her. She had a pretty smile, but she wasn't the girl he'd come to the party with, and so when she tried to put his hand on her breast he pulled away. He remembered feeling a little ashamed at that, he didn't want to hurt her feelings, but it didn't seem right. Not when his girl was somewhere else at that party. He mumbled something polite to the girl and made his way to his feet, stumbling from the room.

He tried to make his way down the hall, but the combination of cheap beer and expensive weed had him staggering and leaning hard against the walls before he'd gone more than a few feet. He noticed in passing that he couldn't remember when she'd disappeared. There were still plenty of people at the party, the girl with the pretty smile he'd left behind. The older man who seemed oddly out of place amongst so many young people. The skinny boy who kept dancing in the front room, so desperate for attention that he'd been making a fool of himself for hours just so he could be a part of the group. There were people drinking in the kitchen and in the garage and smoking again in one of the bedrooms. Suddenly his head began to swim and the presence of so many people seemed to press against him from every side. So he stumbled to the heavy back door that opened out on to the wooden deck behind the house and the grass field beyond it and made his way out into the cool night air.

With the door shut behind him the light from inside the house suddenly disappeared. It was dark that night. He stood there alone in the darkness for a while, and then sank to the ground and laid in the grass while his head spun in circles. He tried opening his eyes and he tried closing his eyes, but it was so dark he couldn't tell the difference and the spinning never stopped. After a while, he stood up and turned back to the heavy door that led back into the party and grabbed the knob in his hands. He steadied himself there for a few seconds, holding it tightly in his grip as he swayed ever so slightly. A moment more, and he righted his posture and returned to the light and the smoke and the smell of alcohol.

He found her later, sitting alone in one of the bedrooms. A man was there, holding her hand, and when he walked in to the room the man got up and left without saying a word. She looked up at him, and he knew immediately that something had changed. She'd asked him to come to the party, but sometime during the night she'd gone from wanting to go out with him to wanting to go home with someone else. He knew that the moment her eyes touched his. He tried to make small talk with her, but it was lifeless. Whatever they might have shared or been was already gone. He tried to offer to take her home, but she said she'd get a ride. Something had happened while he'd stood outside in the dark, and there was nothing he could do to change it.

He remembered again the feeling of her shirt sliding over the back of his hand, her hand on his moving it away from her breast. He remembered the little gifts he'd given her, a lighter with the name of one of her favorite bands on it, a mood ring he'd bought for ninety nine cents at a gas station. He remembered the drawing she'd made for him of her favorite cartoon character on a napkin one day at work. He thought about the little cotton wristband he had in a drawer in his bedroom at home. She'd left it at his house one night by accident and he'd never mentioned it to her. She wore it to cover the scars on her wrists. He wanted to keep it because a part of him thought maybe she'd stop hurting herself if she couldn't hide the cuts anymore. He thought about that little black and white wristband as she stood up and turned her back on him, walking out of the room and leaving him there. Alone.

Somehow he made it to his car. The drugs were all coursing through his system by then. He couldn't remember much of the walk back down the road to where he'd parked. He remembered getting sick along the way. Then he was sitting in the driveway in front of his apartment. Somehow he'd driven home, but now that he was there he was too drunk and stoned to get out of his car and go inside. Or maybe it was something else. So instead he used the last of his strength to pull up on the release lever on the side of the car seat, lowering the chair back into a flat level position and fell asleep there in the car.

That night he dreamed of her. He dreamed of the darkness. He dreamed of the girl with the pretty smile who had his hand on her breast, and the girl with the cuts on her arms who had not. In his mind they became one girl, and then every girl. He dreamed of the look on her face when she stood up and walked away, leaving him sitting alone on the edge of someone else's bed at someone else's party. He dreamed of the circles he'd traced on her stomach and the night she'd fallen asleep on his couch. And again and again it would all disappear as the darkness would wash over him, filling him until he thought he would burst from it.

When he woke in the next morning he tasted vomit in his mouth. His back was stiff and one of his arms was badly cramped from the way he'd jammed it between himself and the gear shift to try to sleep comfortably. He tried to remember the night before, the party and the girl and the darkness. He tried to remember the way she'd smiled on the way to the party, and the look she'd given him before she walked away. Then he tried not to remember. But he couldn't change what had happened.

“Time only moves forward.”

He sat up and opened the door to the car. The sun was high above him now, its light covering the world like a warm blanket. It shone down on him as he made his way slowly up the steps of his house. The door was white and the sunlight reflected off it with such intensity that it stung his eyes, still sensitive from the smoke that lingered in his clothing from the night before. As he reached in to his pocket for his keys he remembered the feeling of the world spinning as he stood in the darkness on the porch the night before. The darkness was gone, and this was another porch, but he could feel his world starting to spin again.

When he made his way in to the house he laid down on the cheap, rough carpeting of his rented apartment and cried. The tears poured down his face and fell to the floor below and he rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling. Something had happened last night, and things were different now. His tears poured down the side of his face and he made no effort to stop them. He let them all run out, until he had no tears left, and then he pushed his way to his knees and then to his feet.

He allowed himself to remember once more, and then he shut it all away. He built a wall in his mind, and the girl, and the party, and the darkness, and the feel of her hand on his hand all went behind the wall. And when every memory he had of the time they'd spent together was safely on the other side of that wall he bricked it up. So tight that nothing could pass between the stones. There wouldn't be any tiny sliver of light to show him all the silly dreams he'd made for them. No little reminders of their first date or their first kiss or the nights they'd stayed up together until the sky slowly began to fade from black to blue again. He'd shut it all away, and never think of it again.

And somewhere in his bedroom a little black and white cotton wristband would sit, untouched, until he'd stumble upon it years later and casually throw it away. Never remembering why or how he'd gotten it in the first place. And if somewhere there was a girl with scars on her wrists that she couldn't hide from the world anymore, well, somewhere there was a boy with scars on his heart that he would hide from himself forever. Never thinking about her or that night again. Never allowing himself to remember again. Never. Never.

Never.

Because remembering isn't redoing and reliving isn't possible.

Time only moves forward.