4 | Psychopomp Magazine
Wilna Panagos
Memoir
Remember the nights when the feral people burnt their memories in the middle of the street to keep warm. How the colour of the fire changed with each memory. And the smell of them. Acrid, some, sharp and bitter. Tactless. Others, the soft biscuit smell of nostalgia. The soldering smell of lines and asterisks crackling in white and black. Remember the diagram of a woman lying in the bath of stars with her buoyant, naked breasts. Remember when we were feral, when we slept on a bus full of flowers and people. Remember the road across the ocean and this tempestuous bus riding it, some of us thinking it's a circus caravan. Remember the leap of indomitability. How it looked around and saw a mote, an idiosyncrasy, and paused. And then it was too late. The leap had left, and the indomitability was stranded on a cliff and turned into a misdemeanour. Remember how the reticent muse sighed, and then beckoned. Remember her white clavicle and her invisible claymore. How her lips smelled of peach Maybelline and ambiguity and disapproval. Remember how you warmed your back in the heat of a forbidden car. Remember the skyscraper in the field. That perforated building, how you could see right into its guilt. Its pierced walls soaked with a requiem of the most terrible beauty, the kind of thing you will listen to while walking through the desert without water. Remember the nude lying in that wheat field after the artist painted her, how she turned the wheat into fresh bread just by looking at it. Remember that we die after three days without water and after an unspeakably long time without the love. Remember all the dead things. The dead lava and the dead Cambrian creatures and the limbs of soldiers from the great wars. The dead wishes. These ghosts are everywhere. They are the surface of the earth. This is what we walk on every day. Ride this rocking horse, this black dog. Follow it into the underbelly of the night. Write down the things you see. Write it beautifully and cover your mirrors with it. Use it as wallpaper. Tie it to balloons and let it drift into the haunted air. And you know why? It will calm these inclement memories. It will stroke their temples and let them sleep with their arms around you. It will pacify their doom.