Mausoleum of Memories

Fiction Issue #3: Flash Fiction

Sumair by Amrita Sher-Gil (1936) from Wikipedia

Muffled voices surrounded me, the smell of coffee permeated the air, a distant song from a distant memory played in a distant speaker somewhere, people populated the place, the place just a sunset away from shuttering for the day. And there I sat, in the middle of it all, frozen, lost, in time and in thought, as I watched lips—moving and still, dry and glossed—of women and men sat across different tables. I was lost in the past, memory after memory taking over me. I could see them all like a film projected on a theater screen.

Despite all the life it contained, the town was frozen in time for me. The apartment next to the church where I was first broken, the bookshop patio where I had put my pieces together, the park next to the sandwich shop where I broke someone else, they all reminded me of a time better than today. A past I had lived already. Days bygone. Time had done its thing, its unwavering duty. How could it do that to me? I felt cheated, almost as if the attack was personal, a vendetta against me.

Because I now saw the wrinkles on my face in the morning mirror. Because I now felt the pain in my back and the weirdness in my legs. Because I now felt the resentment, the anger, the loneliness. I cursed time. I cursed the sun and the night. I cursed them all for being what they were, for doing the only thing they were meant to do—the sun for burning bright, the night for the solace it brought, the time for simply passing.

And it passed, and it chipped away at my parts, parts of my life, parts I clung on to, parts I didn’t want to let go. Time rusted the metal in the chair, rotted the wood in the park swing, hollowed the bones in my body. Slowly, atom by atom, cell by cell. They say life leads to more life as cells multiply, replicate. But I had seen the truth, unwillingly. That life leads itself to death, with each multiplication, with each replication. Time, itself boundless, bounds our life, bookending it on both ends. Every day I have less of it, every day there is less of me.

In time, as I sat there surrounded by all those bounded lives, I would be frozen in today in someone else’s life—in someone else’s memory of the town, of the time. I wonder if they watch me the way I watch them, if they look at my still dry lips and blinking eyes, as they get lost in their own past. Doesn’t matter. The town had become a mausoleum of memories—frozen, rotting, rusting—until the end of days and the end of me.

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In case you missed it, here are some older works for your consideration:

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Recently, I also really enjoyed Celine Nguyen’s essay about her experience reading Proust. I highly recommend it!

no one told me about proust