Arugula

Jasmine Ledesma

The cinema of my memories is burning down. 

Language has begun to leave my head through trap doors. Words slaughter themselves as they escape from my mouth. I know the world less and less every day. I baffle the litany of doctors I see, my fading neurons a song they can’t place. They consider diagnoses like oil paintings but come up with nothing. 

I was twenty years old when this began, though I didn’t realize anything was beginning then. You never do. I was walking out from the dark belly of a movie theater with my boyfriend who would later become my husband, the film still thrashing behind my eyes like an afflicted bird. It was late, the sky wearing her black nightgown. Stores hummed in tight orange around us. Traffic lights bloomed. 

It was all very pleasant, except I couldn’t remember my name. 

I cast thoughts into the lagoon of my brain but their hooks came up empty. I had fallen out of myself. The boyfriend, who I still recognized, told me that while he thought the film was a bit flimsy, he liked what the director was doing, especially after that scraggly flick he released last summer. His hand slipped into mine like a corset. I named myself Wishbone at that moment. And bantered back, chirping. Later that night when my name sheepishly came back to me, I was a little disappointed. Underwhelmed. 

That was eleven years ago. 

It wasn’t until six months ago that I began to forget again. It started off small — hallway lights stayed on, car keys left behind on the counter every few mornings. Then got worse over time — which one of these machines is my car? Do I know how to drive? 

My now husband, in all of his gruff sweater glory urges me from doctor to doctor like a cart of fruit. This doesn’t make any sense, he laments at night, when we’ve turned off the lights to stir. We lie in bed like bouquets. Jackie you’re too young, he says. You belong to me too much. I never know what to say except that at least I’m not in pain. But he doesn’t care. He found me in the bathroom naming each tile. 

It isn’t amnesia. It’s not like being blind, or deaf. It truly doesn’t feel like I’m losing anything. But the exact opposite. I’m developing, germinating. My cells bustle in childish anticipation when he falls asleep, ready for whatever is coming. Excitement spins through my fingertips when I suddenly don’t know what to call the telephone in the kitchen. I call it Henry in sultry, playful tones. Henry, you sly dog. Henry, you know I’m no good for you! 

My husband is tired. And scared, he admits one afternoon as we lay on the couch, the cold sunlight glazing over us like a motherless spotlight. He’s afraid of what he might have to do with me when I forget how to eat, or speak. He strokes my hair like a piano. 

I feign sleep so I don’t have to tell him that I don’t feel mangled by the celestial, doomed to some horrible fate. To be overwritten, sung over. 

What else could there be? 

Last week in the fourth waiting room of the month, I read an article about burn victims. Almost all of them described a pleasant nothingness, a spatial bliss while being burnt. I felt complete, one victim said, who stood in her driveway naked and doused herself with gasoline. 

I heard the flames as they named me.