The house had the bedtime quiet and I sat at the computer desk browsing the internet. The screen glowed against my face and reflected off the slice of window that wasn’t covered by the vertical blinds. As I browsed, I sat with my ear buds in, listening to my iPod and blocking out the quiet of the house. The music shuffled to a track from a band that I had discovered late in my adolescence. It was the final track from the band’s second album. My mind drifted toward dates and I realized the notes that reached my ears had come into existence more than a decade ago. The music held a vague teenage angst and even though I had aged, I still liked the sound of it. The sound was alive with emotion and the music rubbed dust from the memories of a previous time. A time that, as I reflected on it, was rife with a languid and foolish discontent.
I smiled at the reflection and listened. The band’s sound encapsulated the rough fatalism of youth and I appreciated how their music quested out and questioned. The lead singer screamed his lungs dry, trying to discover just what was so awful about being alive and young, searching for the terrible secret that adults all held close and refused to impart to younger generations. The end of the song came, rushing up to finish in a flourish of drum, cymbals, and guitar. There was a long gap of silence and I checked the iPod’s screen to ensure the battery hadn’t died. The progress bar showed a half hour gap before the end of the track and I suddenly remembered the hidden song that lay at the very end.
I moved the progress bar toward the end and picked up the first notes of the hidden song. It started and I directed my attention back to the mouse’s pointer and the internet. The sounds washed into my ears and I felt the memory of the first time I had discovered the song. I had lain on my bed in my parents’ house, half asleep, and had startled when the screech of the guitars broke into the darkness of my room. The notes were familiar now and I nodded my head in time to the bass drum. The chords moved and I felt the distant surging of raw emotion that reached out to me from the past, a refugee of adolescence. As I listened, a memory of punching a door lifted up from a hidden place in me.
I logged on to facebook while I listened to the song and the echoes of my mind. It was late and none of my current friends were available to chat. I browsed some of their photos. The realization struck me hard that their profiles were full of memories that I’d never know and I clicked through the photos. I devoured those pasts but felt the wanting in them. The images played on the screen, relics of their mysterious lives before I knew them. I scrolled through their pictures for a few minutes before I lost interest and clicked the home button. I had no new notifications and I switched back and forth between the top news and the most recent pages. Nothing changed and I opened a new tab and browsed some other sites: news, blogs, news-blogs, and message boards. The pages blurred as I scrolled and glanced over the content. Those pages contained nothing new and I sat for a moment, blankly, with the screen and the music.
I focused on the remaining notes of the hidden song and I tried to feel the things that I mildly felt had once moved so violently in me. I couldn’t recall why I had been so upset as to punch a door. I tried to focus on that past instance, something concrete that I could remember as actually taking place. Shadows of different memories flitted just below my perception and I thought I could almost catch one if I raised the volume high enough. I turned the volume to the right but nothing resolved itself. The music throbbed into my ears and my eyes clicked up to the open tabs in my browser, drawn to some almost unnoticeable change.
The hidden song ended and the track changed. The band remained the same but it was from an album of theirs from just a year ago. I noticed, then, that age had crept in and changed the band’s sound. The notes no longer had their youthful grasping and gritty undertones. The sound lacked the rude promise of a too short life, a something to be snuffed away before anyone could care about it. The more recent song was darker and more melodic, heavier and richer with the artists’ ages. I sensed, audibly, the flowering of their frontal lobes, the unseen metamorphoses of the band members. The notes resonated more deeply with me and, unlike before, I felt them without trying and the sounds elicited no half memories but more recent and solid events. I realized the change in the tabs and clicked over to my facebook page again to the anomaly: a friend request.
I clicked the notification and saw who it was. I stopped the music and took the ear buds out of my ears. The quiet of the house wrapped around me and I breathed out into it. Her face wasn’t how I remembered it, but it was still the same. She grinned out of the screen at me and a cascade of events spilled out of the deep cracks in my mind: a violently drunken phone call, driving through a hot summer afternoon, bad food served in overpriced diners, touches and horrible words in airports, young and awful feelings of nausea. None of the memories were connected, but they came out, one after the other and my mind struggled to place them in a rough sequential order. Images and smells and sounds fell out, but they were all obscured and muted. The memory sensations were all wrong and I wondered if any of them had ever actually happened. The stories they told were out of order, all jumbled and fragmentary bits of useless information. I reviewed the message that came with her request:
“Hey, it’s been a long time. I guess I’m not mad at you anymore. Wanna be friends? It’s only facebook.”
I could hear her memory self saying the words as if she were sitting next to me. I heard the inflection of the question mark and the slight clicking her lips made when she started a sentence. I left the message open and opened a new tab to view her profile. I clicked through some of her photos and found they were typical online images. Some of the pictures were self-shots, either in a mirror or from arm’s length; some were of her immediate family, a niece, a man with some other unknowns and ancient photographs from her childhood.
I came across a picture of her in a sweater that I vaguely recalled and my eyebrows jumped when I noticed that I was in the photo. Her arm laced through mine and I stood smiling next to her in my own sweater. An almost memory of those sweaters floated up to me from somewhere very deep. I looked at the hard details of the photo. I was certainly me but with an impossibly young face and bad skin. I couldn’t remember ever taking the picture. I had the rush of half memories again but nothing helped me place the scene in the picture. The photo showed its past reality in elaborate detail, but I only had clouded memories of sweaters.
I put in my ear buds and restarted the music. I felt the pull from the recent sound of the hidden song and replayed it. The hauntingly young screams of a decade before had suddenly become more relevant. I listened more acutely to the track: the distortion, the vocals, the annihilating drums, and the bass and hum of the guitars. The lead singer’s voice grated across me and pulled at something far below me. I felt a stirring of something that I hadn’t known for a long time. I let the feeling come up and sit hard in my chest. The feeling lacked description, outside of its weight. The song ended and I skipped over to the other more recent and mellower song from before. The lead singer’s voice elevated from halting and young, to more tortured and older. I turned up the volume until my ears hurt and listened to him, the older him, the more mature and realistic him. The weight seemed to drift away, leaving the song to fill up its passing.
I clicked through her profile and looked at her pictures again. She was there, smiling and older. She too became more real now that the years had gotten into her. I scrolled through the photos again and settled on the one of us in the sweaters, but the almost feeling was gone. I sat and tried to will the weighty feeling of the young lead singer back into my chest. I knew the feeling wouldn’t return and I didn’t revisit the song a third time. It had slipped away from me completely, gone somewhere, taking with it the half memories of sweaters and shattered recollections of fevered touches in darkened rooms. I swallowed and turned down the sound, muting the volume to the ear buds. I closed the tab with the photos and sat in the glow of the friend request. I hovered the mouse over the confirm button.
I clicked it and a message box lit up the screen. I started typing something in the text area but the words were scattered and they felt wrong like my memories had been. I deleted them and tried again, but the result remained flawed and stupid. I tried again to find words that recreated the screaming youth of the lead singer but nothing came. I closed the message box. I checked my home page of facebook again and saw her latest status update sitting at the top of the queue, along with the profile picture of the older her. The update announced that she had been at work and was heading home for the day. She had posted the update eleven hours ago. I signed out of facebook and shut my laptop screen. I turned off the iPod and removed the ear buds. The quiet crept up again, almost complete except for the background noises of appliances and plumbing.
I sat at the computer desk for a while and listened to the noises. A few long moments passed and I rose and crossed the room to the window. I looked out at the black winter night and tried to call up the shade of the memory sweaters again, but without the photos my mind only produced approximations of other, more recent sweaters I had owned. I stood at the window for what seemed like a long time before I turned to go to bed. I snuffed the overhead light and walked the hallway. I opened the door of the children’s room and put in my head. I listened and made sure I could pick out their breathing. Their breaths were almost synchronized, but not quite and I closed the door slowly to avoid the squeak of the hinges.
I turned away from the children’s doorway and entered my room. My wife was sitting up in bed, reading by the light of a bedside lamp. She didn’t look up as I arranged my own covers and slid under them. I picked up a book that lay on my night stand. I opened the book and read for a few minutes before my wife stopped and put her open book on her lap. She looked over at me for several seconds but I didn’t stop reading.
“You check on the children,” she asked.
“Yup.”
She looked at me and waited for me to continue but I didn’t and she did, “We are so old, you with your Hemingway and me with my Austen.”
“Mmmhmm.” I replied as I leafed over to a new page. She picked up her book and began to read again.
We sat together in bed and read our books. After a little bit, she closed hers and turned off the light. I closed my own and put it back on the night stand. I shouldered into the mattress and turned away from her. I listened to her movements and breathing as she adjusted her position and drifted off to sleep. I lay with my eyes open in the dark and smiled to myself about what she had said.
