She knows that once she goes upstairs she’ll confirm that the lonliness is there, and the check will be done. She’ll then return to her room to check that all of her secrets are in place. She’ll do none of this and wish she could remember the real reason she wanted to go upstairs. You see it was many years ago that she took “none steps,” as they called it, and “forgot.”
Lights. Camera. Action.
There is no time to remember why I should not indulge. There is only the interruption or natural flow of life. She sat there thinking about how she didn’t want to end up like Virginia Woolf, heard a noise she knew was nothing, but used it as an excuse to go about her comforting checks anyway.
There was this intense feeling that she’d forgotten something, and she had. That’s how she dealt with it, and she didn’t care if her words sounded pretty. When she was a little girl she had once said after having being questioned, “I took none steps and I forgot,” and instead of dealing with life, she just felt the intense guilt and fear that a child feels at having done something wrong, something small, something like forgetting that a child is permitted to do and still be loved for. Some called her an angel, some the devil, and she is confused as to which things are reserved for writing at this point in her life.
I do not like this intense pressure I feel at having forgotten something, and I do not want to forget how to get rid of it, or what it really means, for I am not a witch but a woman. In this moment, there is literally not a thing in the world that I need to remember. Having unlocked something within her she laughed to herself and said “blessed be,” and deep down a terror loomed, and even deeper still, something else that she couldn’t quite detect, but she enjoyed the way “still” sounded and went with that. “Writing has changed since that day I forgot,” she thought to herself and sort of understood some things about herself that there simply were no words for at this time.
cozyredrosie 