Everything I Can’t Remember
1.
Garages were always hiding things. I thought to myself as I fumbled for the light switch, I could have sworn it was right behind this old fridge six years ago. I think everyone starts out wanting a garage, and for the first few years, they are religious about parking their cars in it, like getting married. I assume every marriage starts with two people crazy about each other, and one night, you just come back exhausted from work, so you park your car in the compound instead of the garage, and just like that, no more parking in the garage, no more goodnight kisses.
Even though my parents got married after ten months of knowing each other, and spent their entire savings on a house, it’s almost hard to imagine that they were the stereotypical crazy lovers. I never grew up to see them wear matching outfits or even ride in the same car and even though I rarely saw it, they had this familiarity, that old friend’s charm, that type of relationship where most of the things you laugh about now are the only things you shared in the past.
I did this a lot — start out setting my mind to one thing and end up doing another. Like I was doing now, I came in here to look for an old blender I could fix up before school resumes, but here I was, thinking about my parents being in love. I could feel the light switch now; it was a little bit higher than my reach so I stood on my toes so I could reach it. I slipped, but an old office desk caught my fall.
2.
Before there were cars to park in the garage, it was an office. My dad started his business in the garage, and when we were younger, he’d always tell us all about it, he’d stand over the desk, telling us about how he made nothing out of something. I think every African parent had a story like that, a story of how they made it against all odds and built everything from nothing. With time, my dad got busier and busier, perhaps that was why I hardly saw my parents in love, my father was always traveling. As a little child, I always wondered what he felt like. If he ever felt left out coming home to everyone asleep and leaving before everyone woke up. When I was old enough to, I waited for him every night, and when he arrived, we’d make small talk and wait as the silence stretched between us like a lifetime. I liked the silence; it is the only way I knew how to tell him that he matters.
I don’t know how it all went wrong, I don’t know how life chewed up my father’s dreams and spat out man-shaped loneliness. Over the years, I wished that we had more than the silence to talk about. We just exist, watching the air fill up with everything we wish we could talk about, but we just get by, every day, drowning in the very air we breathe.
My mother still kept my dad’s first shop open. She was like that, resilient, a believer. When I was younger, I always wanted to be like my mother, she seemed perfect like she could do anything. She could actually, she saved us from a fire once, she was the only female engineering student in her set, and she started a march against sex for grades in her school. I was a spitting image of her, so naturally, I knew I was going to be just like her and I worked hard to be.
My mother never wanted that for me. She’d deny me turning out like her so much that I thought she was disappointed with me. She wasn’t. With each passing day, I see my mother clearer now, I see myself clearer, just another typical African woman who has had to sacrifice her dreams for her family, for every single one of us, wasting away, at the ideal cliché of what a woman should be.
3.
The sun was streaming into the living room through the crack in the curtains, stopping at the entrance to the garage. The light in the garage was on now but it wasn’t as bright as I needed it to be. I knew the garage had a window, it was right there, above the old washing machine, but it was too high for me to reach. I thought about my sister and my eldest brother, they’d reach it in a heartbeat.
My sister was growing so fast. Taller, fuller, and way better than I did when I was her age. I am one of those people that never grow, we just get stuck in that one moment in our lives, and we cherish it so much that we don’t want to move past it. I know this because every time I asked my sister about something we both enjoyed in the past, she’d shrug and give me that “I’m sorry but I don’t know what you are talking about” look. She forgot already, she moved on. I don’t think I could, or ever will.
On the other hand, we all recollected similar memories of my eldest brother, he was always far away, boarding school from a young age and Europe at an older age. We all make mental notes to call or text him, and we do so, but he doesn’t reply or replies late — different time zones. So we just talk about him instead, making sure that the memories of him were still in place. We share that little sigh afterward — longing for his presence, hoping that he thinks about us too.
4.
I picked up a stool from a corner in the garage. I needed to reach the windows so I could open them. The stool fell from my hands and made a loud bang on hitting the floor. For the first time, I realized how silent it was in here.
Before the garage was home to old stuff, it was just a space, a vacuum. I thought about my older brother. When we were younger, we fought most of the time, bonding only when we listened to our voices bounce off the walls in the garage, and we still fought about that later. Ever since we were kids, our bond had always been based on how much you could act like you hated each other, and make jokes about each other. Somewhere along the line, I internalized this as my idea of love, telling myself that that weird boy with rashes who enjoyed punching me and sticking gum in my hair liked me. I grew up that way too, only understanding love when it is presented as hate.
5.
I have been standing on the stool with my hand on the picture bag for a while. I carried the bag and settled on the stool, clearing the cobwebs and dust off the bag. As a child, I was big on pictures, the little camera flash locking all those moments in time, so I could come back, like I was doing, to relive every single one of those moments.
A picture of the four of us as kids were the first picture in the bag. I remember that day, it was on Sallah and we all wore matching gini attire, sitting on the old couch with our colorful sunglasses on. My father loved that picture so much that he made it into a glass sculpture, but it felt different in print, more real like I could almost yell at myself to remove the glasses.
We were five children now. My mother had my baby brother later on after we were all bordering on our teenage years. I worry about him, I worry that he didn’t have all these moments to share with us. I worry that he’d grow up, to every single one of us being tired and busy. I worry that in the rare moments we are all here to laugh together; there’d be no camera flash to keep the moments in. I worry that he’d grow up alone, I worry that every time he came into the garage, all he’d see was old rubbish, no memories, no echoes, just rubbish.
I knew for sure that the next time any of us tried to clean up this garage; it’d be when my parents finally decide to move out or if any of them died. I was slowly coming to peace with it- that with every back ache I tend to, every sigh I asked about, my parents were losing time and I was losing them.
Most times, I wish someone had told me when I was younger, that growing up was everything and everyone fading away till you can fit the whole of your life in a garage.
