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

than ever, somehow even more alive. And just like that, I felt a switch flick: as if someone had slipped new lenses into my irises, like an optometrist doing an eye test, and in that split second everything fell apart. I could see through the dazzling arc, through all that glitter and distraction, into the absence. Only now it wasn’t an absence. I could see Deb. She was there. She was just across the street.

So I called out her name. And I ran.

I ran straight out in front of traffic. People were yelling and brakes screeching. I could hear all this but there was no weight in it. No meaning. This was a pure thing, it had to be prioritized over everything else. I reached out my hand towards Deb.

But she looked right through me. I had forgotten that I must look different, even though she was just the same. My hair is short now, and I have money these days—not that I’d dress like a troubled nineties teenager even if I didn’t.

It took me a few seconds to realize all this, and by then it was too late. Deb had disappeared into the crowd, the ordinary people, people from Toronto, from this world. And in the closing of an eye this world flowed back in and swallowed me. The wormhole in my eyes blurred over, healed up like a wound, and the pain was back: the drilling pain in my head, now joined by that other familiar banging pain across my chest. I vomited onto the sidewalk. (Sidewalk? Not pavement? Et tu, Victoria?) I threw up twice, the second retch gurgling on for a long while, as though I were disgorging some giant intestinal worm, long-established in my gut but dead for some time. Finally ready to exit.

I had fallen down on my knees. After I stopped puking, a kindly passer-by helped me up and walked me to a taxi. They must have paid for it as well. The taxi took me to my hotel, and I stumbled up to my room, and I dumped my body on the bed, heavy and half-conscious.

—

So here we are. Back in the present moment. The “present” is an exceptionally tricky thing to accommodate from a metaphysical point of view. What differentiates the present moment from any other moment? What’s a “moment,” anyway? If simultaneity is relative like Einstein says, how can we even define such a thing as a moment? Two moments would be the same moment from one frame of reference and not from another. And even if we could handle this, are we supposed to think there is some kind of magic shiny light on the “present” moment that makes it special? Do you think your “now” is the real one? Why not your grandmother’s?

Philosophers talk about “moving spotlight” theories of time: moments get “lit up” in an orderly sequence. But if there is a spotlight, why should it move? What if it’s stuck, say on a cold October morning in 1984? Or pointing straight down on the first moment I saw Deb? I was always attracted to this idea of a stationary spotlight. Stories, dreams, political movements, people…they all tend to have a “now” that is stuck somewhere. The one time that’s real, the one that counts, frozen solid. The idea of a moving spotlight is meant to give us something objective to cling to, an equitable distribution across all the candidates for “now.” Everyone gets a turn: form a straight line in an orderly fashion. Well maybe it just doesn’t work that way. Maybe some nows get way more than their fair share, and other suckers never get a break.

So what? Life’s not fair. This isn’t a problem I can solve. I only know what I can do. What I have to do. As soon as I can stand, I am going back out there. Back to where she is. Where I need to be. I am going to find her. I can do it. I can see Deb again now. The circle’s closing.

—

And that’s it. That’s the truth.

Almost the whole truth. I’m not quite done. I didn’t exactly lie about anything but I could have been more honest about one part. Because it wasn’t just my mother. My uncle told me about this once, right before I left for the girls’ school. My aunt never found out that I knew.

I come from a long line of women who all ended up in mental institutions. My mother was thirty-nine when she cracked. Her mother was about forty, her mother the same, and her mother, and that is as far back as anyone knows. None of us ever got a diagnosis. Nothing more precise than some era-appropriate variant on what the kids these days call “cray cray.” So this is what we share. Like we only have one life story between us. That’s our heirloom. And my uncle, of all people, was keeping this gem for me.

It’s always a little bit like that, though, isn’t it? Someone else takes over our stories when we stop telling them, when we can’t say any more, when the path of least resistance is to let the circle be a straight line? Or the other way around. A circle with a bad memory might as well be a straight line anyway. If everyone tells you it’s a straight line, it’s a straight line. A straight line is everything in order. The Cop would approve. And Poirot: he always needed everything in order. Then again, Holmes’s rooms were a big mess. Drove poor old Watson up the wall.

I honestly tried to get help. To be well. To be made healthy, sanitized. Sane. I made a good faith effort, as they say. Gave it the old college try. Help—now there’s a word. But it was all talk. On and on and on. So much verbiage, garbage, landfill, waste to plug up that one hole, the silence, the terrible empty centre. The absence of