She wasn't quite sure exactly how she had gotten to this point. The events leading up to it blurred in her mind, lines flooding together in a whirlpool of emotions. She wasn't sure where one memory ended and another began. But it was there, all of it, in the back of her mind, to remain there forever.

Sometimes a smell, or a color, or a halfnote of music would bring a flooding of recollection back through her eyes, triggering a pull at the corners of her mouth, or a sad smile across her lips. Memories are what made up the first seventeen years of her life, quickly fading and lingering slowly on her tongue. Everything she remembered was as if she had been told it as a small child rather than lived it. She supposed one day she would find herself standing alone in an unknown place and not know who or where she was or how she got there.

Sometimes she would forget what she looked like. She didn't know how much she weighed when she was born, exactly what shade of blue her father had declared her eyes, just how the carpet felt underneath her plump fingers on her first birthday. And she didn't miss it. She hung on to the better memories with disparity, pushed the unpleasant ones away like a mass of melting snow littered with dirt and remnants of the fall.

She didn't know where she came from, how many generations of her family had attended the same college, just how long her parents had courted before finally settling down and having her, what her aunt had said when she found out she was coming, or how her grandmother's eyes had twinkled while she made oatmeal raisin cookies. The only memory she had was of the ocean, glittering like thousands of emeralds and sapphires tumbling across the sand. How it felt as it skittered across her foot. And that as the tide slowly came in, it erased any evidence of previous disturbance. It was if no one had ever stepped foot in the sand, left their partial footprints in half melted sea as they shared joy or sadness, constructed delicate flowers or castles on a late fall day, right before the ocean became too cold to bear, disintegrating as water met grain.

The ocean was hers. That is what she remembered, and held on to every day of her fleeting life.

feedback