…the speaker above me blares into life;
“Citizens!
The moment has come again. Here we are, waiting for the past to dissolve. By the time this hour
ends, we become new. Become nothing.
We reset.
We renew.
We forget.
And we live forever and ever and ever and ever and…”
The voice fades into the distance, lulling me for a second.
I shift, staring at my reflection.
I fidget with the hem of my shirt.
I watch my pupils dilate.
Forget.
A word. An end.
I focus on the girl in the mirror and picture her with a past, a childhood, a family.
Gone.
No. Not yet.
I stare at the glass vial on the table, the glittering liquid inside shimmered, catching the dim light.
It pulled me in, soft, and inviting,
I almost reached for it.
A filtered invention. A “gift,” as they called it. Immortality through amnesia. A chance to live
endless lives, unburdened by the past.
Pretty things are dangerous, my mother used to say.
My fathers voice echoed in my mind
“Who wouldn’t want this? Who wouldn’t want to live forever?”
Taking it wasn’t a “requirement,” but if I wanted to walk out of here alive, I had no choice but to
drink it. An unspoken threat. They didn’t need to force us; they knew the fear of death would.
Who would willingly choose to perish, to become nothing more than dust in the dirt?
That was the genius of it. The capital didn’t care if we drank or not.
“One less vial taken, one less mouth to feed” they’d say
They had studied human nature long enough to know it was about survival. Our own hunger and
desperation to cling to life did the work for them. We kept coming back, not because we were
forced, but because the alternative was unthinkable.
So I hold it, pick up the small delicate thing and feel its weight in my hand.
“The decision is yours to make, but if you resist, it is you who will bleed”
I gulp it down in one go.
Guilt twists like a knife in my gut.
I close my eyes and feel the serum work its way slowly through my body. I feel myself being
drained, but this ache in my heart persists, a hollow pain gnawing at the edges of my being. I
must not forget, I must not forget. But the world distorts itself and my reflection blurs. I try to
concentrate.
Just breathe.
Focus.
My breath comes out in jagged gasps as I drag slipping memories around in my mind. But no
matter how hard I try, the ache grows louder. It doesn’t go away, it digs and pulls at me, trying to
make me forget what I am holding onto.
I fumble for something. Anything. My hands shake as I fish out a small paperback from my
breast pocket, and I almost break down as I flip through the pages. All those times that I wrote
about her and all those times I forgot.
Someone’s voice stabs through my mind;
“It’s a relic”
“It’s a useless mistake, why would you hold on to this?”
Was it my brother, Peter? Perhaps Sara? Sara, my friend? Or was it my neighbour? My
neighbour- who was my neighbour? What were the words? What did the voice say? Why was I
holding a journal?
I read the page, and embedded deep against the ugly frayed and decaying pages stood the word:
MOTHER.
Regret knots my stomach like a vice.
No. No, no, no.
I slump down to the floor, gripping the book like it’s a lifeline, I can’t help but cry. I didn’t like
this one bit, they said being immortal would be fulfilling, that I could live as many lives as I
wanted to and never grow old, but my mother, my frail old mother who got stuck in that
gruesome age. Who would take care of her? What would her next family be like?
“We’ve created something that puts you all in our debt.
It a gift, in return we expect you all to accept whatever identities we give to you”
A gift? This was no gift. This was recycling people and using them as puppets to construct a
world that’s run by the ones in power. The ones blessed and privileged enough to speak into
these speakers everywhere, had never had to experience love. Never had anyone like my
Mother.
I call out to her in my mind just like Orpheus calling back Eurydice, only for her to slip away
forever. I try to remember the soft planes of her cheeks, the wrinkles on her forehead, her
calloused hands, her soft eyes. I clutch at the fragments, pulling them close, desperately tying
them together.
I won’t do this again,
I tell myself.
This is the last time. They won’t just relocate me again. They won’t assign me a new family.
But that’s what I always said, and then I end up forgetting again and again. Maybe that was the
price I had to pay for being human, flawed and being involved in something that went against the
world’s natural cycle of death and decay. I didn’t have much of faith or hope left in me but I got
down to my knees, and I almost heard my fathers voice call out to me
“Desperate people find faith”
I could hear the sirens ringing in the distance, my time as someone’s child, daughter, sister, lover,
friend was coming to an end.
My heart burned as I lay on the ground, the journal in my hands. I tried to close my eyes and
recall my past one last time but nothing came back to me,
I tried to remember who I was but nothing came back to me
I sat up and I looked around,
Found a mirror and stood in front of it
I tried to remember who the girl was in front of the mirror, why was she crying?
I opened the small notebook in my hands trying to see if it belonged to someone, but all I found
was a word, scribbled and scrawled against the pages.
The word comes out as a whisper from my mouth;
“Mother.”
It floats into the air and disappears before my eyes.
And I don’t understand what it means at all.
By June