If you ask her what her earliest memory is, she’ll tell you it was white. Cold white blinding snow in an abandoned parking lot near the old church in the middle of the city. Spinning around trying to catch some on her tongue, dizzy and laughing until she fell down and stood there very still. She never tells anyone she thinks it might not be real. The memory, that is. The church and the parking lot are still there but sometimes she thinks she imagined it, her mind playing tricks on her. If that’s not her first memory then what is? What happens to people who just don’t have one? They’re a little less real than the rest of the herd. A little less genuine and a little more dead than the rest of them.
So she keeps her fingers around makeshift memories that make her childhood appear happier than it was. That’s what’s beautiful about the mind. If you tell it enough lies, they become truths. They become the same in the darkness of your mind. So she remembers being loved and being told she was pretty. She imagines her father is a handsome man who has aged gracefully as opposed to the faceless monster in her dreams. The man who takes pieces of her until she’s left with nothing but an echo of his face. Eyes that belong to her and a nose she just can’t place. Demons so familiar she takes these things out on herself. Cold white blinding truth. This is the way she kisses ghosts when she thinks no one is paying attention to the ways that she haunts herself with things that will never change. Tortured ideas of how permanent this is.
You can’t change this, girl.
You’re unwanted.
He never wanted you.
You don’t exist.
The make-believe girl has three half-sisters and they all have names prettier than hers, even though she came first. Exotic names. Madison is the spoiled rude one. The one that knows she’s beautiful, the one that scoffs at compliments and doesn’t know the invisible one exists. She wouldn’t care, anyway but the girl without real memories sometimes wonders what it would be like to have a sister, like on those sitcoms where the daughters share rooms and talk about boys and do each others makeup. Those fantasies are as real as the man who left without her name. He’s turned into folklore. Someone made up, a monster to scare her away.
Away from what, she isn’t sure. Away from this. A way to get raw edges mended. Some wounds need to be cauterized in order to heal. Seared flesh feels like lies against her lips. Like the unspoken truth that everyone knows but no one says.
What else is there to do, then, but wish for snow?
