A Few Young People Lucky Enough
by Jocelyn M. Ulevicus
What can be said about time as it passes through the body, changing its shape, the heft or lightness of a single foot forward, backward, sideways, often, thinking about the way time moves through the body: is that memory? Is that why my dreams seem to be all charged up with abstract colors and people I haven’t seen in a while, and people I haven’t met yet and G, that old lover of mine?
I am thinking about my two old friends, Louis and Lena, I am thinking about their kitchen in Paris, how Lena puts all the herbs and spices into little glass jars because, she confessed once, she hates the look of plastic. Can’t stand it. When she buys the tiny plastic bottles of oregano or thyme or cinnamon, she dumps them straight into a glass jar, unlabeled, with little cork caps, and somehow, as she tells me this, I know that a detail like this matters more than we care to realize. She flashes me a smile.
The first time I spent the night at their house, Louis said to me, “Here, look,” opening the lid of a small, oval-shaped dish painted with delicate pink flowers and edged with gold leaf. Inside, there were squares of dark chocolate. As I reached in for a piece, Louis closed the lid and laughed, catching my finger, his eyes sparkling with mischief and a strange kind of fatherly love.
Across the courtyard, there lived a young couple who liked to fuck with the windows open. Louis, Lena, and myself would be sipping coffee or wine, smoking cigarettes, pot, while the slim naked lovers slammed and thrusted into one another against the wall, the window curtains left to either side gently swaying with the wind, and the three of us pretended not to notice the periwinkle color obstructing our view.
And everything how it was felt like it would be forever.
***
My sense of time and its passing is not the same as it once was; time feels formless now, formless and accelerated at once. Days stretch on into weeks, stretching on into months with no designation except for the odd, what day is it? speculation, and the, oh, it’s weekend again! acknowledgement when, at six p.m on a Friday, I pour a glass of wine.
Something has broke in me and split me in two. There is a lonely suffering now of something I feel but cannot name, an inherited memory of hunger belonging, and not quite belonging to me, the person of me in this moment. My body feels vacant and full of holes where all the memories fall out. I try to catch them without falling. It feels strange being myself.
As I sit here this morning, I shake the tea cup to dissolve the sugar, in gesture, to signal the beginning of forgetting: there are certain things that can’t help themselves but change with even one minor adjustment. I cross and uncross my legs. Outside, I can hear sirens wailing. I reach down into my shirt to touch my left breast and wish I was someone else.
Then, I changed, without planning to. Suppose time is not measurable after all.
Back during those Paris summers, Louis, Lena, and myself were simply happy or unhappy depending on the day. And now, these old selves continue to exist in places past memory, living out stories with alternate endings than the ones available to us here. I haven’t seen either of them in a while, maybe a year? They don’t appear in my dreams as often as G does; I wish they did. Louis and Lena never made me cry.
I’ve never been able to tell myself apart from the thing that was designed to be alone, such as the vase on the kitchen table. The vase is filled with wilting flowers, roses gone yellow. I can’t stand how sickly they look, but watching the petals fall onto the table sometimes reminds me of the bottomless sea blossoming inside my body.
I wonder if I were in Paris, with Louis and Lena, standing in their kitchen again, if what I’d see is how I remember it, if what I’d hear is how I remember it, would all the scents and sounds and tastes be the same? Would the lovers be loving, would the dark chocolate taste as rich and bitter, would Louis still remind me of my father? Is what I’d feel how I remember feeling, so lucky
to be alive.
Jocelyn M. Ulevicus has a background in Social Work, Psychology, and Public Health. Both her written and visual artwork is either forthcoming or published in magazines such as The Santa Fe Literary Review, The Hole in the Head Review; The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Oscilloscope Magazine. Ms. Ulevicus currently resides in Amsterdam and is finalizing her first book, a memoir, titled The Birth of A Tree, which was recently shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writer's Program 2019 Literary Award, judged by Carmen Maria Machado. In her spare time, she hunts for truth and beauty. You can see what she is up to on IG @beautystills.
