by Emily Rita Roche
Rays of light travel in straight lines. But they change when they’re absorbed, bending and refracting.
They’re memories. Retaining information in the form of color and brightness, remembering it on the delicate surfaces of other things. A piece of light sensitive paper, a shoe box, a white stucco wall, the back of your eyelids as they linger before sleep.
My camera obscura is a darkened room, as most are, a pinhole of light right up top. It shows me the things I can no longer see. My body, naked, unfortified, struggling for power beneath the mass, the inertia of another. The immovable weight of a statutory lifetime.
I wonder why people remember their seventeenth year as so significant. They write odes to it, anthems, requiems. Is it the improbability of adulthood lurking just beyond the seam of their best cuffed jeans? Is it the fact that was the summer they finally learned to shotgun a beer, fearless and inept near the jacuzzi, chasing it with a Winston 100 and newly braceless smile, dipping their feet for a single, wobbling moment?
I chalk it up to the fact seventeen has three syllables, the only teen to achieve such a feat, and I take another puff of my Lost Mary. I’m merely stationary as I take drag after drag, but still drawn in by its kindergarten colors and lumpy shell. It feels right, like anything else might, if not for the terrors.
They’re very obscure and niche terrors. Things you wouldn’t be able to think of. My mother having an affair with the choir teacher, the foresight to see us crashing our Honda Accord before it even happens. I saw it on the backup camera. Death, cries, and videotape.
The terrors tell me, Be not afraid, for I am only you— I show only what’s already known. And there’s comfort in that. It’s like eating a Twinkie. Never as good as you remember, probably stale, but soothing.
The last time I had a Twinkie was at a gas station in Nowhere, Oregon. That’s what the attendant called it. Really it was just a truck stop, not a town, and he was just a stoner running back and forth from his car to sneak hits of his dab pen. I thought about asking him for one, but remembered the time a friend accidentally smoked spice and spoke in tongues. I wasn’t there, but I’m sure I could’ve translated.
Teenage girls are good at that. They create their own languages, little clusters of gibberish that only few can glean. What does it mean to fly a bald eagle? I’m closer to a communist than a consumer, so it’s anyone’s guess. Deep down I know what the bourgeoisie does, that preservation of capital is a fool’s errand. Take one wrong step and you’ll fall into the gallows.
Marie said, Let them eat cake. I said, Let the kids vape. Mary’s only lost between the cushions, not gone, not dead yet, her lithium carcass perfectly preserved between folds of cardboard, a relic if there ever was one.
I nearly was a lithium carcass. Doctor said it would mellow me out, those little pearls of foreign natural. Just like I found in the house on the hill, hidden between sheets of orangesicle palms, holding the hand of an ex-boyfriend who still comes to me in bed, when the camera obscura contracts and releases, blooming nightshade full.
We, the ex-boyfriend and I, would play a game: Which house do you want to live in? It requires little conversation and suggests that maybe, one day, we could live in one of those houses. He points out a square, brutally brutalist unit. I don’t want to be boxed in, I say. I crave warmth and knick knacks. The best use of space is no space at all.
Maybe that’s why I find myself burrowed in the crawl space, surrounded by amplified mumblings as old as I am. It isn’t long in the grand scheme of things. I imagine the earth and realize that I am so skinny in comparison. A single offshoot of a megalomaniac made of iron and carbon and other vast, unknowable things.
Unknowable like my roommates’ memories of that night. What tintype appears in their obscura? Do they jump in and lose time like I do? Lose sense of self and the slow churn of years that follow like snakes and their tails. It’s a valid question, I think. The potency of an alchemist’s brew. Maybe if we can turn iron into gold the earth will shrink again, and I can repeat the night in question, rework the material until it's something brighter, with more humor.
That’s why I try to laugh when people mention bluegrass. I think of the nights spent mumbling mumbo jumbo enhanced by Roy Rogers and rum, throwing cigarette butts at the window of the Shakespearean pub. It was my favorite after school activity for a time, and I’ve thought about putting it on my resume, but I fear it may be off putting for the future lawmakers and shakers of this great and terrible country.
Anyway, there’s this really sexy guy there that plays bluegrass which makes the elder millennials jive so hard and shake their sexy groove things. I’ve thought about touching his groove thing, but I worry if I do the pinhole might widen and the mighty fist of God will come down upon me. But then I remember God doesn’t have to use his fist, I’ve got two of my own and they are furious and punish me enough. Still, without them I’d be no better than a starfish, the silliest creature in the sea.
Starfish used to wash onto the shores of Sunset Beach, the mild and secluded destination my family traveled to every summer. We’d collect them in sand buckets and molest their spiny bodies. It was really so invasive, and I feel terribly about it, I do. But we’d always throw them back in the end, the way the sun brings me back every morning, when the pinhole is more than that, it’s a skylight.
Keeping the sun out is harder than you’d think. There it is, the great creator, a double exposure blurring the lines between then and now. Joy and sorrow. I’m all mixed up, you see. A bag of deviled intent cooking up eggs in the kitchen. The unexpected creeping between me, like the time a little baby chick cracked out. No one believed me, grocery eggs aren’t fertile. But there it was, picture perfect on my iPhone XR, the tiny skeleton draped in goo. Soon after I took that photo I ran the tap, rinsed it down the sink. The scramble still satisfied me, the way it would’ve satisfied the chick had it survived. The remnants probably still stew in my garbage disposal, or maybe they were ground into dust to dust, liquified and traveling light speed through the sewers.
But the impression remains. Every time I crack an egg I’m searching, running fingers through the yolk, runny and broken by my need for reassurance. The same way ex-boyfriend’s ran through my hair, gripping too tight and totally, a reminder that I’m nothing if not proprietary. He hated me almost as much as he hated furries. I knew when he dressed me up in a dog collar, only that. When he put the blindfold on. When his hand thundered onto my face. The camera snapped then, and I don’t have the heart to delete the file, or crumple the paper, developed against my best wishes.
Yet every time I pick up the paper, I’m translated back to an older me who’s also younger. When I take them out of that box, the one covered in hot pink glitter and Elvis impersonator business cards and foam frogs, it’s as if I’ve taken a new angle. The dust and the crunching of corners and the crease lines add to the patina, and I see entirely new things. It’s not the event itself we’re remembering, it’s the last memory. I’ve held them up to the light, double exposed them, rewritten on top in loopy cursive and impressions of great redwood trees and weeping willows. I don’t recognize myself, but there’s my lopsided body, the flecks of white on the bottom of my two front teeth, the curl of my hair resisting the placation of a flat iron.
When I die, I’d like to be turned into a tree. A redwood or a weeping willow, depending on my mood. It’s the only thing stronger than paper, the only thing that can be relentlessly written on over and again. While I scribble notes across these manifestations of light, the light that bends and alters and remembers, writing the dates and places as I remember them, I hope the children will carve their names into my trunk. Or at least the word DILF or fuck or stupid bitch. As if I were tattooed in the dark.