nothing, except everything
October 11, 2023
>> This is a piece that takes inspiration from the bed scene in the short film nothing, except everything. You can watch it here. <<
“Do you think you’ll remember me? Like when we’re old and wrinkly and fifty?”
I stretch my leg as straight as possible, hoping that the tension would work its way down to my toes and somehow squeeze the taut muscles into submission, like pulling on a knot until it becomes so tight it disappears.
I chuckled. “No, I can barely remember what I ate for dinner today.” I know I’m being cruel with the casualness of my response, but it was my truth. Memories weren’t so sentimental to me because I believed in the meaningless randomness of life’s occurrences. I told him that.
“But the beauty and tragedy of life lies precisely in its randomness. You don’t think you’ll be touched by it?” he prodded.
“A memory can be extremely potent to you, or hurt you a lot, or give you a high, but it really just boils down to something that happened and you tagged significance to it. If we wanted to get real scientific about it, the butterfly effect theorizes that any small change could have caused an equally random set of events to happen.” Then to sound less like the pretentious PhD student my dad was, I added, “Which means I probably would have never met you if I hadn’t thrown those retainers away on accident.”
“But you did throw your retainers away. And I did too. And then we met in the backlot trash bins and went dumpster diving together. Don’t you think that’s the universe telling us these two middle school morons were meant to meet?”
His words made me mulled over our first interaction all those years ago. “You’re conflating a funny story with destiny. I don’t see it as fate so much as the series of choices we each made that led to the moment. Like, I could’ve needed to take a fat dump after school that day, which would have delayed me 15 to 20 minutes, by which time you would’ve given up and left, and I would have arrived to a bunch of pre-ripped trash bags wondering which fool was as careless as me.”
He sighed, recognizing the futility of his arguments in my rigidly Nihilistic world.
“Yeah, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ll remember you either.” He shoved me playfully, calculating his aim to land on my shoulder so as to spare my chronically abused cephalic vein. A moment of silence suspended in the air, not quite comfortable as it usually was, because things always got a little awkward when we thought too hard about each other. Then he leaned over and I braced myself for the next comment, for his soft inquiring voice, a hopeful question masked in offhand indifference.
“Maybe I should come visit you...”
To which I responded abruptly, “I’ll text you the next time I come home.” And then the moment was gone, already locked and sealed into a memory that I would continue to retrieve late into the year, grabbing at a high when the inevitable nostalgia crept up, when the distance induced the exact feeling of tragedy I claimed to deny.
What I realized about myself was that I was relentlessly late in this game of love. Despite how much I complained about the bitter tribulations of life, I was the worst one of all. Because commitment was always something I fantasized over but could never execute in reality. Because the more you pushed for closeness the more I withdrew, locking us in a perpetually tentative dance where I only matched your steps with backward strides, and it wasn’t until you rotated to another partner that I finally learned to tango.
So I held this last memory of us close. Hugged it, some days with fondness and others with a bittersweet forlornness. Kneaded the details into different shapes until I forgot how to build back the original copy, until the line between truth and fiction blurred. At some point, it slipped into pure fiction—nobody remembered how it felt at the peak of the moment, not myself nor him. I could not control the recession of my mind. So in the end, it became nothing.