Erased
I hear them buzzing in the middle of July. Christmas lights. Purple lightbulbs bleached by the sun, still illuminated each night, reflecting through my window and the rag too thin to be considered a curtain.
I never complain. Their son died on New Year’s Eve. The constant burn and buzz of each bulb marks another minute the pair is alive while he is not.
Ash falls from the tip of my cigarette and I throw it in the dirt as another faded purple bulb pops and hisses. Smoke rises from both, and disappears on the wind.
The couple next door has forgotten it’s no longer Christmas. There is little they remember.
Death’s specter suffocated any hope that tried to force itself into the tiny home and into hearts blackened by the loss of a piece of their souls. The agony became too great, too heavy; so they called the cleaners. After months of remembering their child was dead, all they wanted to do was forget.
The brain is a funny thing, a system humans still don’t understand. Its partner in morbid comedy is the heart. Neither organ is particularly fair to the rest of the human body and the complicated and unknowable world it exists in. Never agreeing on anything; reliable in that you know at least one is always right, and it’s usually the one you don’t follow.
When the heart and the brain are both broken and play memories on repeat to the soundtrack of sorrow, the desperate want to forget.
Cleaners access your mental hard drive and remove the bits that are broken. They turn you off and on again rebooting your system. The cleaners came to my neighbors’ house this spring, white jumpsuits blinding the only observer (me). They removed a metal box from the back of a van and rolled it up to the couple’s door. Four hours later, the van was gone.
Removing memories is supposed to be delicate, but so many people opted to forget things, the cleaners got sloppy—no one knows when too much has been taken because they will never remember.
A mangled crown of electrodes is placed on your skull, a titanium plate inserted into the roof of your mouth. You’re unconscious as the the cleaners electrocute parts of your brain, dulling, and eventually disappearing, the thoughts and dreams and stories that exist in the space between your ears and on the left side of your chest.
Sometimes they take only what they came for. Sometimes they leave you in a cloudy world of déjà vu, of almost there but not really, words on the tip of your tongue never crossing your lips. In a place that seems familiar, like you saw it in a dream, tormented by the cold intimacy of a thing that you’re unsure ever existed.
They leave you with your Christmas lights still up. Burning out one by one, like the memories they took from you. And like the mangled skeleton of broken glass and wire, your own light has gone out.
But at least nothing hurts.
The cleaners are coming for me tomorrow. I can’t remember why.
