ANASTACIO, JULIETA MARISOL

I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here because really I haven’t done anything, not one goddam thing. In fact until a few months ago I was a superstar, I was something. I’m not any of that anymore. I was going somewhere. Now, instead of going somewhere I am decidedly stuck.

One thing that I do have is a good deal of free time, with which I have managed to formulate a few new definitions in order to explain where I am and how I am feeling. The first and foremost of which is the word stuck. Stuck for me means some combination of trapped and bored. I can’t get out and I can’t get anything else in. This, above all else, is what I think just might kill me. I grew up with interests, and a thirst for knowledge. My family stressed the value of education, and now I can’t continue mine. I was at UCLA, I was going to be pre-med. At first I didn’t remember that, but pieces of it are coming back to me now.

My therapist tells me not to be angry, that who knows, I might go back someday. The way that things have been going that doesn’t seem likely. More should have come back to me by now, more besides the bits and pieces of memories, the information I’ve been given, and, of course, the incident. Sometimes I wonder if I did anything to deserve this bad karma. I have a handful of memories, and one of them is the worst memory of my life. That being said, it’s a pretty broken up, but I get the general idea. It was easy enough to gather what it all meant when I heard what I’d been diagnosed with. Post-traumatic stress disorder, which also meant post-traumatic amnesia, and everyone said be thankful. That was the hardest part to swallow. How was I supposed to be thankful for something that took away my entire life? I understood where they were coming from, since how was I supposed to miss a family that I couldn’t remember? The truth is there’s still a hole there, and now that I do have some memories of them I can really appreciate what I’ve lost. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

So that’s why I’m here. I’m struggling to put the pieces back together and hoping that they’ll form a key out of here.

Here are the parts of my life that I remember, in order.

The smell of smoke always comes to me first, and then my father’s voice. I can’t imagine that I’m much older than ten, but I have no one to confirm that age with. It was morning, and I can remember it being hot already. I could hear him calling my name, and then my brother. He alternated, trying to get us up and out of the tent. Marisol, Emmanuel, Mari, Manny! I nudged Manny awake and unzipped the tent. This one stops there, though I can gather that we were camping. When I asked my Aunt Roberta about it she told me that we used to go camping all the time. She would not say anything more than that, she seemed disinterested. I hate her, she put me here.

The next one is different, because in this one I’m afraid. Admittedly I was about twelve and afraid of a mascara brush. My mother had it in her hand, and she was standing above me. From what she said to me I can tell she isn’t sure whether to comfort me or scold me for being silly. She reminded me that I asked her to put it on my lashes for the school dance, and also that it wouldn’t hurt. I finally let her try when she told me, with some mild frustration, that it would run if I didn’t stop the tears. It seemed to knock me back into my senses. More parts of this are starting to come back to me, like the scandal of the pinch of body glitter I was allowed.

I have a vague memory that I think comes next. I must have been sick, had the flu or something, because everything is so hazy. I remember lying there and being miserable. I remember the slight pressure of heaped on blankets and mostly being very thirsty, but too cold to want to drink anything.

The breakfast table was the start of the next one. Manny was there trying to explain away his report card. He kept expressing how school wasn’t for him, and that he was meant for something greater. I remember the career titles professional skateboarder and documentary film maker. He claimed that school was a burden to his creative instincts, finally and dramatically claiming to be a revolutionary. He said he was Che Guevara. I laughed and told him to call himself Lenin instead, because from the look of dad he’d be going bald eventually.

The next one is less of a story and more just the memory of a sensation. It was a hug, and pomp and circumstance was playing…

Then there’s the incident. It was dark out, and it always starts with a crash. It was the sound of the door getting broken down, and the sound of loud and angry voices. I remember gun shots and my father yelling, my mother screaming. I ran downstairs as Manny tried to run up them. He looked up at me in terror and then his body jerked twice and he fell. Someone grabbed my arm and dragged me down the stairs. I hit my head on the banister, hard. I tried to look up, and something hard hit me on the back of the head. Everything is black for a while. The next thing I remember is lying on the floor, wrists duct taped, pants ripped, and sirens, there were sirens. Darkness, again.

Then next time I woke up I was in the hospital. Aunt Roberta was there, though I didn’t know who she was. I feel like if only I had been able to remember her things would be different, but instead it has all brought me here.

Mari sat in her room, tracing the letters over and over again. It was one of those things that she did to stave off boredom, but also because she needed to. She went over and over the alphabet, again and again. That had been part of the trouble with her amnesia, she had not lost her intelligence, but she had lost the ability to unlock information. It was something that she was very quickly picking back up on, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and her brain wouldn’t be rebuilt in one either. As it was, all she could do was trace letters and numbers, hoping it would stick well enough.

She occasionally tried to find some material to read, but it was more difficult than could have been expected. She had trouble finding anything that was in her reading level, and in addition to that she struggled to hide it when she did. She didn’t want anyone to know that the literacy had, for lack of a better term, been knocked right out of her. Maybe she didn’t deserve to be that vain in her condition, but she was. She tried to hide the broken parts of herself as much as possible in order to be able to be as indignant as possible. If she couldn’t believe that she didn’t belong there, then who would?

gwyri; eastern; a couple years; none yet