Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

My cashmere scarf is a careful camel that goes with everything, and therefore is nothing. An invisibility cloak.

These feet aren’t mine. They’re too old. Veiny. Blue-green Ys tangling, knotting, bulging. Tugging up the skin like chicken wire in a forgotten papier mâché.

I know, I know. Say what you mean and mean what you say. And what the fuck do I mean? It’s like stretching toffee, pulling words out of the air, extracting meaning.

I think I mean I’m not supposed to be here. Not like this. Not these bodily remnants, the floppy edge-bits left over round a pastry cutter.

Chapter Fourteen

This last year in Seattle has been the year in which I became old.

Don’t ask me how I know that, I just know. Like a birthday. Congratulations to me: I have turned old. When it happens to you, perhaps you’ll know it, too. But your symptoms may be different. As for me, my fingers are just a tiny bit weaker now, that’s one thing. Fingers and lips. They shake a little. Not so as anyone else would notice, but I notice. And I stammer. Only occasionally, but it never happened before. The stammer is such a peculiar, wobbly feeling, teetering on the precipice of expressing.

It’s not that these things mean I am old, they just come with the territory. Like not being able to get drunk with impunity. The old body can’t expel the toxins the way the young body used to. Then there’s my face. I have been studying my face a lot. I want to understand it again, now that it’s old. The acne is still there, usually around my chin, but now some of it is starting to sink inside little wrinkles. I’ve learned names I didn’t need before. The tear trough. Nasolabial folds. Marionette folds. Marionette folds. What a cruel metaphor. Your cheeks hang down, either side of your chin, making you look like a ventriloquist’s doll.

My mother always had pronounced marionette folds, although I never thought about them as an entity of their own, until they showed up on me. I spent a good two months this spring trying on different makeup and emotions in the mirror with this new (old) face. How, when I put lipstick on, my upper lip won’t quite stay still. How feelings are supposed to pull on its strings. How I might rewire the connections, if I wanted the machine to perform differently.

I have started to notice that men look through me more often. And memory is more difficult. It’s been happening since I moved to America. Memory is what experience grips to, like makeup needs a good foundation, and I think being foreign strips that base away. So you’re left scrambling with things that shouldn’t require any processing power, like knowing what kind of chocolate bar you like at the supermarket. Genii loci vary in the warmth of their embrace, but America is suspicious and wants me to know I’m an alien. Everything slips and slides.

Time races down the track. There are bends where it sways wildly, and I feel like I am falling off. Now it must be evident to you, Watson, that this young man’s body was placed on the roof of the train. People say things like “the pace of life these days.” As if it were time’s own fault. For speeding up. From what? One second per second, like in the good old days? When men were men? To…what, one and a half seconds per second? Two? Seven thousand? It isn’t about time. Can’t be. It’s me. Or if not me exactly, not time either. Something else. Whatever it is in which we’re both, time and I, only passengers.

My calendar tries to help, tries to keep my life in a linear order. But it’s no good. Time requires maintenance that only I can do, and I seem to be becoming less capable. I try to leave space between things, or else the days grate and grind against each other like the joints in my neck. Then the calendar needs massaging. And it always requires a daily scrub-down along with the kitchen surfaces: you have to put enough effort into cleaning. Don’t get buried in last week’s dirty dishes. But on the other hand you don’t want to get obsessive about it. If you’re scrubbing specks off the counter every ten minutes you might be better off just installing a dimmer light bulb in your kitchen. A certain amount of forgetting is necessary. Like sleep—without it, you die. Isaac Newton wrestled with time, with what happened when. He wanted to get clear on the dates of ancient Egypt, of Atlantis, of the coming End of Days. Tried to lay it all out in order. Now it’s all considered a huge failure. His entire project.

I don’t struggle with long-term memory, though, just the short-term. The mind’s copy-and-paste function. Things go missing in there for weeks then pop up at the wrong moment, too late to be useful. Or my mind will get mangled, sending me to the Dollar Tree to post a letter or to the cashpoint for a pint of milk. Not pints—how much am I getting, when I buy milk here? See, that’s what I mean. No traction. Everything slips. Either the body fell from the roof, or a very curious coincidence has occurred. But now consider the question of the blood.

And that. Yes that exactly—when my mind suddenly pastes in something out of a Sherlock Holmes story. Or Agatha Christie, or Shakespeare, or whatever else it grabs at. For no reason. Why do things like this happen? I like to quote things, but I would prefer to do it on my terms. When I decide. It’s even worse when my voice follows suit. Then other people will look at me, and I’ll rush to explain whose words they were originally. Only it’s never a