They will call me Ether. I will see this name printed on the back of a photograph of me with curled edges and sepia-coloring depicting a time I no longer remember when I gave birth to my first and only son and so I assume this has always been my name. Later—sooner than I care to admit—some will call me Etherma or EtherGran. I am nearly through to the present and my end is coming like the last note of a song.

I do not know my past, not truly. Almost everything I will know about myself is extrapolated from the future I know or what I have written down in the past. We write down our futures when we are young and soon enough they collide with the past. The future moves into the past as a river goes — one way!

I know that in my younger years I was a short woman, always in the front in group pictures. That there have always been two suns and three moons. The river I gather water from was wider when I was smaller and the scars of my body are many; pink worms of keloid inch across my limbs in places that feel too much. I will be sensitive to the lightest touch on my ankles and wrists where the scars protrude in a ring like the southern mountain ranges all my life but I will not remember their making.

I do not know when I lost you but I know I will not find you and I am going to keep missing you in the biggest of ways. The way that cuts the stone from the river and sprouts magma from the earth. A longing like a wolf’s howl but softer. I will ask my friends for pictures of you, and in them you will be a ghost but still I will go on loving you again, from scratch every time.

Instead, I know the future. I know: my son will grow large like a stagecoach horse and learn a trade that will cover him in ashes head to toe each day. (The child has your name and in the last moments of my life I will not know him because all of him will be in my past but, you, I will know because I will die with your picture in my palm.) The rains that come from the east will be fewer and fewer until many of us decide to leave this home of ours for foreign greener lands. I know too, that this will obliterate them, cause them to lose their home entirely in the forgotten past, knowing only a future of a distant planet. I will dye cloths with bundles of acrid greens and acorns I gather in the woods to sell and provide food for myself after the heat comes and the crops die and the nights will seem longer and longer even in winter times.

I can hold onto a memory, like sucking on a drop of honey, for the time it takes the second moon to rise and fall, before it disintegrates. Others are better at it. My son can hold on to it for days if he makes an effort. But I am enjoying this voyage into freedom. Every day I know less of myself but there is more to discover. I am a flower in the final phases of bloom, unfurled petals reaching toward the suns.

I never call it a curse, this inability to remember, until I meet you. We, the forgetful ones on our rock with our own three moons and two suns, call it curse before we meet the others on their funny blue orb calling future, future and past, past. (This is because we can see further, and in the further we sometimes mix it into the “past” due to our handwritten biographies.) Those others marinating in the past looked to us with cow eyes. Big and droopy. Cursed, they said. We pass this from tongue to tongue in the future. Cursed to walk in a path made for me. Those steeped in memory tell us we have no free will, no soul even, like the dead walking. Our future is set.

We laugh, we always do when they say this, because doesn’t their precious history create the unavoidable future? Are they not bound by their former selves? Us, we live knowing ourselves as the greater beings we will become. They know themselves as infants and only come to greet their true selves on their deathbeds. Ours is a process of becoming, becoming, becoming. Theirs is only undoing, looking over their pale shoulders at their own shadows to weep and regret.

And yet curse I will call it when I think of you. You, who I lost and will never find. It stands to say I chose this. I knew I would lose and did not falter in my path. Knowing the way does not make it less desirable to us. We cannot mourn what will happen.

Yet, some of us take the memory-hoarders, from the planet that is not ours, into home. We call them historians. Historians eat, and talk, and breathe with you so that you may remember through them in exchange for lesser things they want. Some have formed a symbiotic knowing cycle whereby past and present collide. Both known, and yet incomplete in a way that we can never understand.

I asked a historian to come to us before I lost you. I know this because he will visit me in ten days to remind me who we were. He will tell me you had honey eyes and a voice that stammered. He will tell me more and I will shush him. I will push him out the door knowing that he is only recreating you. He has made you out of thin air for me. Only, not you, but a perception poorly remembered. The historian will laugh and laugh and laugh in his mystic-looking cloak until the sound of his footsteps fades.

For many years I chose not to reread the places in my biography where men made the thick strands of regrown skin on my body. The body remembers, that is one constant between the historians and us. My body, without my soul, would still know so much of me and you. We can feel the past in our blood like a sixth sense. It guides us as an angel would.  My body tells me which men are not to be given second chances, which dirt under my feet feels like home, to avoid small spaces, and the scent of every flower like a portal back to spring, warm.

Our love poems always beg, “Come to me in my last breaths so that I can know you since I was born.”

But you will not come. And as most of us do, I will die laughing because I will not know anything beyond the absurdity of loss. Or perhaps, I like to think, I will laugh because I will be gaining a knowledge of a new future for myself, the next chapter of life. Something that will fade just the same, unraveling as it comes.

***

K. Gladkii is a writer and researcher based in woodsy Northern California. Her work has been published in Room Magazine.