Letter to Memphis
Memphis. She was the only person that ever left the Dale. Memphis. The one place in the world we were given the chance to imagine. As far back as I can remember, much of it buried in the hazy corners of my mind, in the months before we were taught to read, before we were allowed television, the days before the outside world existed to us, Memphis told us of Memphis.
She said that she watched the lightening as she flew through the clouds. She could reach out and nearly touch the stars. As her ability to fly dawned on us as children, a world was born. A world outside of the farms and the schoolyard and the dinner tables and gardens and living room floors. A whole world.
Most were not entirely comfortable in her presence. There was always a part of me that resisted believing her. Suspicion is too strong a word. A secret feeling that she wasn’t telling us everything. But there was something so undoubtedly attractive about her. We all wanted her beside us, always wanted to be the one eating our lunch with her in the field. She was there for all of us, yet forever inaccessible. We lived within her sphere, and yet most never penetrated her hiddenness.
To imitate was to somehow participate in her mystery. But it was also to understand that you could never really know her. Her gravitational pull, was down to enthusiasm. She showed no interest in us as people, but only in her ability to share with us. She ran away many times, sometimes for days on end, and would always come back to share her stories. Her parents took no notice, their neglect easily misunderstood as respect for her sense of discovery.
I felt privileged that my house was the closest to hers. I was her go to lodge when her parents came home late from work. What further developed my infatuation were our similarities in looks. From a distance, both the boys in the schoolyard and our mothers would often get us confused. I was never the center of attention, unless I was mistaken to be her. Yet I often found myself the center of her attention. And that was more than enough.
Memphis would not rise to people’s uncompromising adoration. She would brush it off, ignore it. When she got bored of Harry Potter, the other kids would pretend that they too didn’t care whether the wizards would defeat Lord Voldemort. When she cut her hair short, stories of other girls throwing tantrums when their mothers would not let them do the same.
Memphis gave herself to books and learning, reading under the covers to hide her adventure literature and scientific intake secret from her parents. She told me she never felt as good as when she was sleeping, the torchlight creating universes on the back of her eyelids.
I went on holiday with Memphis only once. Her parents took me to France with them. In the car park of a hotel we were staying in lay a swimming pool behind a fence. We ran barefoot over the gravel to get to it. It was raining, the water droplets falling from the sky and landing in the pool, creating endless growing circles over the surface of the water. I couldn’t see the bottom. I stood in confusion, but Memphis didn’t care. She saw my expression and understood. Memphis asked me what was wrong. I remember seeing a monster sinking into the pool’s darkness. Memphis changed attitude, telling me she was scared to swim this late. My first reaction was to resent Memphis’ patronizing kindness. But I soon absorbed my sudden change of fortune, and nodded my head, an acknowledgement of our unspoken understanding. I knew that it was not an act of charity.
The following day, we got into the pool. We jumped and dived and splashed. Memphis told me that if I exhaled and sat at the bottom, the water would act against gravity. As the sun sank, Memphis turned to me and told me that it was late, that we were still swimming. Her broad grin signed that she was not trying to prove my stupidity the previous evening. She was celebrating my victory.
Her father was a bull of a man. Even now, to think of him resurfaces a burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. Coming home from a particularly extended exploration of the local landscape, Memphis noticed a faint glimmer of orange in her garden. Upon arriving at her home, she discovered her parents stood watching her wooden swing set aflame. Her Mother, a bottle of wine in one hand and lighter fluid in the other, smiled at her as she slowly paced into the garden. The swing set that had once inspired the dream of flight within her was now engulfed in flame. Memphis told me she saw herself sat upon the rubber seat, unbothered as the flames licked the sides of her face, her skin turning a charcoal black.
She used to get the wrong school bus home to discover new ways of trekking home. Memphis did it with a boy when she was young. He was two or three years above us. She told us all what happened. How he leaned upon her. How he held her and squeezed her and pushed himself in and out of her and panted and sweated.
She never became subject to the same upheavals as us. Her dramas were of a different order. Internal. Without doubt they were more brutal, but without the abrupt punctuation forming the sentences and paragraphs that was our spelling out our lives.
She called me about a week before, and told me of a dream she recently had. In the dream she went into a charity shop with her Mother and Father. She was looking through the books. After a moment, she realized that she had read every single one of them, in chronological order.
The books were a map of her childhood. Of Memphis. She was remembering all of these different things that happened to her when she was reading the books, like when she thought that he lost her bumble bee painting when she was six, or when she had to wee behind a bush in Patrick’s fields because she couldn’t hold it in any longer when she was eight.
She traced through the books, her teenage years. More and more books to fill her hunger for knowledge and dampen the inherent distance she felt towards her peers.
Then she got to the book she was currently reading. She took it from the shelf. The final chapter was blank.
She noticed something in the corner of his eye. Next to her was herself, offering a cup of tea. Her clothes were soaked, clinging on to her swollen skin, her eyes bloodshot, her elbows bloodied and torn into shreds of dark gore.
She realized that she wasn’t in the room any more. Her parents were gone. And then she woke up.
Whatever she became since I last saw her, I can’t shake the feeling that she was already an echo of that person when she came back from Memphis. She was formed very quickly, a sharply defined person and we hadn’t even learnt to read. She was visible, in focus, far before we became people of shape. I do not think I would be wrong in saying that I have kept the aura of those days inside me, and to that extent I can still feel how we all felt back then.
In her last letter to me during my time at university, she told me that she had bought enough books to last her a lifetime. I guess she wasn’t joking.