My name is Memory.
My mom died giving birth to me. I was told that she held me tightly, covered in her blood, and cried out, “Me morí,” which means “I died” in Spanish. Those were her last words. “Me morí” sounds like “Memory,” and that was the twisted reasoning my father had when choosing my name, right before clogging the exhaust of our car with a wet towel and attempting to suffocate us both. I was the only survivor.
Growing up, I never had any friends. But at university, Kind became my first friend. I don’t think I was his best friend, but he for sure was mine. We met on the first day of classes when our Art History professor asked us to get in pairs and get to know each other. I’ll forever be thankful for that professor’s life, because God knows I would have spent the next four years of my life alone if it wasn’t for that one conversation. Kind was a silent person, as silent as one can be, but people just seemed to gravitate towards his indifference towards the world and its pain. Everything was simply better when he was around. He had such a comfortable soul.
Kind yearned for romance, while I, myself, wasn’t really the relationship kind of guy. Every year, he would somehow survive a “we’re going to get married and have babies” relationship that would last about five or six months, tops. After the breakups, driven by grief and his relentless spirit to find love, we would spend the remaining months of the year hunting for romance, quite unsuccessfully most of the time.
Regardless of how many girls we fell for every single week, my heart always belonged to Names. I caught glimpses of her eyes everywhere I went after I first saw them four years ago, and everywhere I went I thought she was beautiful. I somehow and somewhat belonged to her. Kind, trying to help me ask her out, joined us three and Archie to give a presentation about world hunger on our first week at university. However, that only chained me eternally to her as a friend. As the years passed by, my friendship with her grew larger, but the shyness of my love grew even larger as well, to the point I simply couldn’t endure the idea of her eventually treating me like a stranger when we’d inevitably break up after graduation.
One terrible evening inside my apartment, one week before our graduation, her pretty laugh, coming from downstairs, woke me up.
I hazily walked down the stairs in my pijamas. My three P.M. nap had turned my day into night, and Kind had taken the liberty of gathering the whole friend group inside my apartment to watch the video of our terrible first presentation and cry about it. As I stepped into the kitchen, Archie graciously and promptly pointed out that I was wearing pijamas at eight P.M. and brought the community together to ridicule me. But hey, at least they ordered pizza.
“Guys? Guys! They are saying that aliens are real!” shouted Alex suddenly. “On the news!”
Everyone turned their fingers away from my face as we all immediately turned our heads to see the news. All my friends saw pictures of UFOs, mass terror, and neon lights in the skies.
I, myself, saw Kind kissing Names on the mouth.
© Diego Ballesteros 2024-05-01