Junior year. Millsaps College, Intro to Psychology.
Listening closely, I am acutely aware of the heat creeping up my neck. Under a black N95 mask, my cheeks are burning red. I flush easily – when I’m excited, if I drink, and most certainly if I’m stressed.
Another term pops onto the screen, followed by a bullet pointed list of definitions. I enjoy psychology because it’s outside of my field of study – it’s work to conquer, but interesting enough for me still to care. The topic for this week is memory.
Across my own notes, I bubble a circle next to the new term – a denotation system I have for the phenomena I can find examples of in my life. This week, the bubbles keep building – something is happening.
Loosely defined, flashbulb memories are snapshots of time stored in our brains. A flashbulb memory is hyperreal – sensation is heightened, even the smell of the moment so real it might have happened yesterday. Anything with enough emotion behind it might become flashbulb memory, but the ones that tend to get the most attention in our minds are the uncomfortable ones.
In the memory, my mother and I are trailing a plump man across the bottom floor of a tall brick building, listening and nodding. Along the walls were murals – even inside of the chain-gated elevator.
The front entrance was dotted with round tables covered with bright purple tablecloths where I would later sit and experience my first morning meeting.
We sat down at one of the tables, my mother beside me and T. across from me. I passed him a forty-page short story – one of the last things I had written before my first depressive episode.
I had been silent since then, writing-wise. My childhood days had been filled with storytelling and reading and wild dreams of changing the world with a poem. When I was fourteen, it just stopped. There was no more need to put words into a world that would never change and would never be safe. Once the world had revealed its it ugly gray head, I had tucked my head to my chest, wondering how years of teaching Bible Drill and nodding in youth group could have gone wrong.
Applying to a performing arts school to begin a creative writing major was a bold, even stupid move for someone who had barely read or written for two years. Still, I believed that the love of these things was an essential part of me. To begin again, all I needed was a push.
And begin again I did.
T. began scribbling in red all over my papers, polishing, recommending, and perfecting, his forehead creased even while his lips smiled.
“School year starts in two weeks,” he said, finally looking up.
“So, does that mean she’s in?” My mother’s eyes were widening.
“Yes,” he shrugged pleasantly, as if there had never been any question. “She has a natural gift for description – I can see everything written here,” he put his hand flat on top of my story.
“We can work with this.” He folded his hands over his crotch, legs spread as we began asking questions about dress code and other menial details.
My parents were uncomfortable with my beginning in second year Spanish as a sophomore after already having completed a year of French from home. That wouldn’t be an issue, he assured us, I wasn’t the only student with this issue. Coincidentally, the school was implementing a French class just that year.
I was also two grades “behind” in Math. He switched my schedule around so that I would begin the year with Algebra I. Everything was fine and normal and when my mother posted about my acceptance on social media it was met with a flood of congratulations. My homeschooled friends at church went silent.
In the next two weeks, my mother meticulously brought up every question buzzing the air between us as I sat silent, cold, and shy.
“Can she dye her hair?” I knew she was thinking of the time I had emerged from the bathroom with lime green streaks in my hair and a soiled white shirt on a Sunday morning.
“The only thing we don’t do here is goth,” he said. “Our children walk in the light of Jesus.”
It’s always the goths those men do not like