“Not forgetting is different from remembering,” my friend Darlie said, sliding a recent photograph of my parents and brother into a cheap metal frame she bought at Walmart just for me. It was from the last family dinner we had out. Our waitress was a teenaged flake and my mother didn’t trust her not to screw it up, so that’s why I wasn’t in it. It wasn’t a portrait masterpiece; their smiling faces seemed to be trying to push outwards from the finite, oblong boundaries of the photograph. My grey bearded, pink-roly dad in his red-‘n’-white table cloth matching shirt, my chipmunk-cheeked mother, her tanned skin mottled with freckles as it was every summer from her gardening habit, and my ever-long faced elder brother whose lips hooked into a smile, but whose eyes were devoid of feeling or thought, squished shoulder to shoulder, quick-snapped by who else? - over the fried zucchini and buffalo wings appetizers. After seeing the picture I had begun to criticize them for their plastered smiles, but then the entrees arrived and the conversation turned to the heated topic of the annual family vacation. The one I couldn’t be a part of because I had applied up for – and got – a full time summer internship in Palatine, two overly long hours drive from anywhere fun or remotely vacation-like.
Darlie adjusted the glass in the frame and showed it to me. I averted my eyes from it. “Shall we put it on your dresser or…” Darlie looked around my one-room studio. There weren’t a lot of flat surfaces, but not because there was clutter. Things had their place, and everything was always in its place. There just weren’t a lot of places to put pictures because I didn’t have side tables, or a coffee table, or any furniture of that sort. I liked my things in boxes. Except my desk. My desk things were laid out in the open on top of it, in no particular design: my lap top, my pencil case, my binders for school, the books I was reading just then. Things I needed on a daily basis.
I made the mistake of looking at my desk and Darlie caught my gaze. “Right, then. Your desk,” she said.
“No, not my desk.” I said firmly, not harshly, but Darlie looked at me as if I had stabbed her. “I don’t need photo frames taking up space where I need to put my books.”
She looked so forlorn then, as if I had pulled a knife on her, my truest, dearest friend (as she saw it); the framed photograph of my family held up expectantly in her hand, waiting for a tiny bit of space in my studio to open up. I relented, but only slightly.
“You can put it in the bathroom,” I said.
Darlie’s eyes boggled out of her head. “What? No, we can’t do that. It has to put somewhere where it can be seen.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes.
“Not forgetting is different from remembering,” Darlie repeated. Where had she heard that phrase? I wondered. That was the second time she had said it, and each time she looked down at that photograph of my family, as if they had been forgotten.
“You didn’t even know them,” I said, my words coming out harshly this time, even though I hadn’t meant them to. I didn’t apologize, feeling that Darlie had overstepped the borders of friendship into my personal business.
Darlie didn’t respond, but walked into my bathroom, a tiny, white-tiled glory hole. There were no flat surfaces there either, except for the top of the water tank on the toilet, where I usually kept extra rolls of toilet paper. She squealed when she discovered this, as though that were the most perfect place for a framed photograph of anyone’s family – even hers. “You will see it every day in here,” she said, smiling back at me. “Every time you poop.” Her head jerked a little as though that last distasteful word did seem to actually “poop” with a pop out of her mouth.
Darlie was beginning to get tired of me. She was starting up with her cutesy voice now, sprinkling baby words like “poop” into her conversation. If she started saying “oopsies” I knew I was in big trouble. Whenever she thought I was being morose, Darlie would compensate for me by behaving as though the world were a paradise for toddlers where cupcakes of all flavors and icings fell like manna from the heavens and everyone wore overalls instead of jeans. I once asked her about this paradise of hers and she confided to me that overalls featured in this fantasy world as the most angelic attire “because your belly bulge made the outfit cuter, not uglier”. It didn’t matter to her that I brought up the point that if angels existed they probably did not possess belly bulges. It was her paradise anyway. Darlie never asked me about mine. No doubt, after all the years of knowing me, she assumed I had never bothered to imagine one.
“I have more photos to put up,” she announced after arranging that family portrait – noticeably missing me – on top of the toilet.
“There’s no more room,” I said.
Then, again, she repeated that irritating phrase: “Not forgetting is different from remembering.”
“Is that what this is all about?” I asked, pointing to the scattered photographs that took sliced scenes from my childhood. I stood over the shiny slips of paper, refusing to look at them. But being that there was nowhere else for me to stand in that miniature apartment of mine, I saw and recognized each of them. There was one of my mother propping me up to see my first birthday cake. She was looking right into the camera, smiling and trying to get me to do the same. Her mouth was forever twisted in words she was saying to make me do it. Instead I looked terrified of the camera or my father, who I assumed was the one taking it. In another my brother and I stood, in puffy winter coats, beside two enormous lumps of frozen grass in ice that was meant to be a snowman. There had been almost no precipitation that year, but I insisted that winter could not be without a snowman. So my brother trudged out with me and we hacked out chunks of ice from the yard and with hot water from the kitchen fused them together to form Frankensnowstein. My brother appeared to be proud of our effort, but I was sulking. I remembered thinking that he was such an idiot for believing that our miserable lumps of ice could even attempt to pass for a snowman. There were others too, photos whose vibrant colors and fluid shapes I knew from my various memories of making them.
I looked at Darlie, coming out of the bathroom. “Are you trying to get me to remember?” I accused her. “If you are, you should know that I never forgot. And since I haven’t forgotten, I can’t possibly need to be reminded to remember.”
“You haven’t cried,” Darlie said.
“So what?” I exploded. I regretted saying that as soon as I had. Not because I was sorry for yelling at a concerned friend who was trying to help me through what she perceived to be a rough time in my life, but because now she was going to give me an answer to my question, a definition of the “what”. I sighed, in anticipation of the long lecture I had sentenced myself to.
“So what?” Darlie repeated. Her voice was full of incredulous pity for me. She came over to my side and put an arm around me. I refused to hug her back. I didn’t need one and seeing that it was my family who had died, I failed to see why she needed one. “So you’re holding all your grief in.”
I looked directly into her eyes. Those watery pools reflected a sorrow that was welled up within herself. Sure as hell, I knew I was dry as petrified bone. “I’m not grieving,” I said.
“Of course, you are, silly-poopers. They’re dead.” She pointed to the photographs on the floor as though my dad and mother and brother were down there, fallen, flat, two-dimensional rectangles of shiny paper that were merely misarrayed and waiting to be properly allotted a final ossuary in my future life.
“So? Death is the natural outcome of life. There’s nothing to grieve.”
“You should cry. It’s what’s natural,” Darlie insisted. “This lack of feeling, of anything, is freaking me out.” And right there, she hit the coffin nail on its head. But Darlie didn’t seem to realize that she had sealed the box herself, and that its closure was hers.
“Not forgetting is different from remembering,” she said again.
I rubbed my face with the palms of both my hands, exasperated at this ridiculous phrase she kept saying, pretending that they meant something to her. “What does that mean, Darlie? Is that something you saw on a card at the Walmart? In the bereavement section?”
She had no idea what those words meant and it infuriated me that she kept repeating them over and over and over, as if they would somehow prick a hole in my skin and a dam of tears would burst out and ta-da! my grief would be released and over. And then we could get on with life, and school and head over to the bar for dollar-you-call-it Thursday. I was saving her the trouble; I was telling that there was no dam to release, no built up pressure to relieve.
“I’m only trying to help,” Darlie said, a petty sulk turning down the corners of her lips.
“There’s nothing to help.” I said, still angry. If she wanted an apology, she’d have to wait a good long while. I wasn’t going to give her one for an error she was making.
The photograph she had chosen to honor must have been more potent in its evocative portraiture that I had thought when I pushed the shutter button. The three smiling faces had become to Darlie more than my own father, my own mother, my own brother. They had transcended, in death, to become representatives of another holy trinity; and it was this symbolic representation that Darlie saw in this photo. That was why my heresy felt so treacherous to her.
“But don’t you want to remember them, to honor them and stuff?”
I sighed and started to collect up the photographs she had printed for me. I put them next to the frames she had bought. They were for me, false idols, but I understood that Darlie could not grasp that.
“I don’t need to remember something if they’re still here.” I prodded the side of my head. “You shoving their pictures in my face is guaranteed to make me never to forget them. But,” I gave her a wry smile. “Not forgetting is different from remembering.”
