Memory Is Plastic

Emily rested her head on the window of the bus and stared at the evening sky yet again losing herself to the misty clouds of her imagination, her means of numbing the agonizing hurt she was inept of understanding.

 

The bus engine roared startling Emily. She peeked outside the window and looked upward. A thick blanket of russet clouds engulfed the heavenly firmament leaving only traces of the dusk light which would soon be gone. Just like the hope that she had for herself would be pertinently camouflaged by the scars of her very existence. When darkness slid into the ether, she felt herself fade.., but the cold waft of air comforted her that she would emerge somehow... Someday... She didn’t know when…

 

Emily closed her eyes for a moment and was astounded to see herself dressed in a white gown floating above one of the clouds, the veil of her dress flailing behind her as she looked athwart the horizon that mesmerized even the heavenly birds. Who was she really? How did she come there?

 

It was two hours for the bus to reach back to her hometown. The tranquil of the countryside lulled her while she rested back on the red-hued foam of her pew. As the bus grabbed a crack, emerging slickly on the main road, Emily felt a hand on her sinewy satin thighs. A buttery, cloying touch that ensued several impalpable sensations within her leaving her wheezing. Weary of the blurry muddle those hands conjured in her, she heralded an agreement that caused her to rouse with a jolt.

 

Just as she had incited twenty years back.

 But back then she used to seep more often.

Now, she knew it would not make any difference.

 

Back then when Emily had woken up in the middle of the night, Sarah was sleeping besides her. Sarah, her step - mother. Emily wailed in terror while she told Sarah about what had happened in the afternoon when she was unaccompanied in the bedroom. And Sarah assured her that it was a DREAM.

 

Emily’s father Mike was informed about it.

Emily was so lean then. But not anymore. And she hated that. She would never be happy with herself, no matter what...

Emily’s life resumed customarily. But, her definitions of normalcy had been permanently altered. Sometimes, she struggled to find the difference between a dream and a reality and that flung her into a gorge of culpability, emerging from which seemed an unnerving chore. ‘Imagination’ was her respite because only in her creation; people and relationships and things and situations were not ‘distorted’ unlike her 'realities’.

 

So, once, as a child, Emily imagined that she excelled at school and she did. And then she imagined this and then she imagined that and many other things.

Until one day she realized the means that her soul cast-off to contract the appalling discomfort which awakened her to the reality of life. But she did not know what she could do now? She constantly questioned if the evolution of her being which was an endurance response to the conflagration, REAL? And if it wasn’t, then what was? How could she separate the triumphs of her subsistence from the motives that had commanded them upon her? At times she wanted to slay herself to the imploring sense of grime that she had brawled over the period of years. But she wasn’t so feeble. Else she wouldn’t have survived.

 

Despite her valiant encounter with the contorted veracities of her life, Emily felt an unsettling void swamp her. She was enigmatic, wise, knowledgeable, keen and above all, a survivor. She knew life was fair even in the direst circumstances and that had kept her animated. But she felt her existence was in-comprehensive as she needed to be seen for who she 'was' and a sense of not being able to do that led her to avert that need directing her towards a pursuit of achieving an intangible feat of disambiguation for herself which had left her exhausted.

 

Emily wanted to be with someone without being thrown into the darkness of her contorted past. But was that possible?

Memory is plastic you see. The neurons of your brain interact with one another at a junction in the brain called the 'synapse' and that leads to the recording of experience. Every single experience.

And, when you have the same or similar experiences in your life, the recording only gets strengthened by virtue of the firmer and more prominent interactions between the neurons.

Emily was now aware of her reality.