There’s a song you need to hear. I think it’s called Beulah. Or my daughter is named Beulah I’m not sure. It’s my morning alarm. Emma Blowgun’s last Stand. My daughter is Emma, I think. Blowgun? I don’t know. My diary:
16 June, 1999
Mom has always looked faded. Like a cheap watercolour print left too long in the sun – all the colours but blue fade. She has faded in pale blues. Beautiful. Tired.
She taught me some things: always write what you don’t say. Don’t let it fester: send letters to nowhere if that’s what you need. Just write. Write it down.
I remember my 6th birthday party; I’d expected a good Lego set, or at least a decent Barbie; I got a journal.
Since I learnt to write – always a journal. She was ingraining the habit. I suppose.
I turn sixteen. This is my gift.
The book itself is small and unassuming; brown leather bound, the endlessly blank pages beckon to me from where it now sits on my bedside table.
Despite its size, the book’s presence looms in the room like a heavy smog, seeping into every inch of suburban carpet and sapping the colour from curtains, bedspread and window frames.
I am sixteen when she presses it into my hands. It is cold, and unnaturally heavy.
“For you, Eliza. I’ve had this for a long time, and you’re old enough now. It’s yours.”
I wasn’t paying attention. If I was, I would’ve noticed a lightness about my mother that I hadn’t seen in my lifetime.
Instead, I say:
“A diary? But I still have the one you gave me when school started—“
“This is different.”
“Different how?”
“You – you need to be careful”
“Mom? I don’t understand.”
“Before I was born, this book was your grandmother’s. Even before that. It was your great-grandmother’s, and her mother’s before.”
I flip through the book.
“But it’s blank? Am I not supposed to write in it?”
“You are,” My mother says gravely, “You have to.”
“But everything you write takes its pound of flesh.”
“Like, literal flesh?”
“No, obviously not. My mother grimaces.“It takes in a different way.
My confusion only grows the more she speaks:
“Eliza – Sit down.”
She perches closer to me on the edge of the bed.
This is a sure sign of bad news. She only sits here when grandma dies. Or when parents get divorced.
“Eliza,” she says.
“It won’t be long until I start to go –“
“What?!” Panic rises in my voice, “you’re dying?!”
“No,” she clears her throat. Not quite.”
“Eliza,” She pauses.
“Do you remember me when I was younger? I’m sure we had fun. I’m sure it was beautiful. But I’ve faded.”
“Do you have, like, cancer or something?”
‘No. Eliza, this is more natural than that. I’ve forgotten.”
“You’ve forgotten me? As a child?”
“I suppose, yes. I know you’re my child. I don’t remember.”
“Why?”
“The book. It’s the forgetting book.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? You just forgot everything important to you in favour of this forgetting book –“
“Eliza, you don’t understand. This book is yours now, Your beast, your burden, your freedom., your –“
And I did something then. I don’t remember. I was on the edge of the bed. My mother next to me. I woke up alone. My mother is gone. I think I wrote something in the Forgetting Book. But every regret is gone. I have flashes – the crunch of bones, the echo of empty promises. What I did is gone. I have the Forgetting Book. I can do anything.
I remember her warning.
“The Forgetting book. For every bad memory you give, it will take a good one; for every good, the reverse.”
I have so few to give. I have so little I want to take. Let it begin.