I don’t like remembering the past. I only think back in tidbits, praying that the terrible memories won’t overthrow my mental faculties like a band of angry mutineers aboard a ship. These memories hold meanings, ones that I have yet to fully dissect from the pain I feel. If I can just let myself stop the experience of reliving the memory, and only analyze it as a psychologist would, I might be able to get to the bottom of my fate. I fully believe I can chart the path of my fate through my past, leading me to the present, and essentially, I’ll be able to follow the line my future will take with my finger, as if tracing a line across a roadmap. Even if fate is imaginary, or if it’s impossible for me to predict my own future, at least I will feel better about my present predicament by pretending I know exactly where my life is headed.
            I want to feel useful, or even used. As long as I’m noticed, I can stop thinking that every action I take has no effect on the universe. I feel that everything I do is a blank void, utterly unhelpful to anyone or anything. I don’t even take a course of action for myself to benefit from, for what is there for me to gain anymore?
            I get up from the couch, where I have been lying for the better part of an hour, lost in thought. Surprisingly, an idea has occurred to me. Normally, as I think back on my past, I am so overcome with sorrow that I become counterproductive to my demand of understanding my fate and I become lost in my own head, and to stop all pain, I fall asleep. But this time, I have stumbled upon something, an idea I have fallen into.
            Walking to the window that looks out onto the city, I pass by my typewriter sitting on the wooden desk in the corner. There is no paper in it, which draws my attention. I haven’t written anything by machine in a while; I find it easier to write my thoughts down in my own hand, for it makes me feel more human if I read my own handwriting rather than a machine’s.
            The machine is an old Dvorak typewriter, bought in the 1960s. It came with my mother’s possessions after she died, even though I had no use for it. It had been barely used then, and it remains that way, not as a tribute to my mother but because I fear that what I write will be so misanthropic that it will destroy the whole machine.
            I feel the keyboard, noting that the vowels that make up most of the left side of the layout look slightly more worn than any of the other letters. Did my mother’s oil, from her fingers, discolor the keys? It is true; my mother did some typing as a secretary for a few years. But the keyboard is not what is bothering me.
            I put my fingers on the ribbon, feeling the ink that I had known was there all along. The ink should have dried up long ago, yet there is a healthy coating that covers the ribbon. As I lift my fingers out, I see the black ink that has stained my hand, a mass of darkness that has crawled from the typewriter to my arm like a parasite. The ink is still fresh. A new ribbon has been implanted for the typebar, a delicate operation done in order to use this antique. Did I do it sometime before, forgetting about it until now?
(Hello Adam! It’s so nice to talk to you again.)
            The black ink on my fingers starts to itch.
(I’m still living with Whitney, and she says to tell you hello.)
            I’m starting to remember changing the ribbon.
(We didn’t even really expect for us to get pregnant.)
            I go to the table, rummaging around through the endless swarm of papers that I have saved, the ones that remind me of the times when I wasn’t so disconnected from the world. It is a sea of white, like the foam from the waves that smash the beach with their fury. I tear through the papers, throwing the unimportant ones on the floor, rampaging through the letters with my hands. At last, I spot the envelope with Sylvia and Whitney’s names on it, and I tear into it, cutting my finger on flap as I reach in to grab the note, not letting it get to me, unfolding the letter, my eyes scanning the page.
            It’s typewritten.
            In this age of technology, where typewriters have been antiquated and put to death, where computers have overpowered their forefathers, Sylvia and Whitney’s letter has been typewritten. It could be a coincidence that I had overlooked. Maybe their computer is broken, maybe my typewriter’s ribbon never dried out. I’m not convinced – but convinced of what? The fact that I am questioning myself of forging the letter, of writing to myself is in itself an act of accusal.
            I have bled on the letter, the cut from my finger creating dark red blots that have intermingled with the black ink on the page. The resulting mix of red and black resemble my Dvorak typewriter’s ability to produce both a black and red ink by flipping a switch. I am starting to doubt myself.
            Flipping the envelope over, I find no return address, no stamp, and no recipient’s address. The letter could not have been sent through the mail, yet I had obtained it from my mailbox. Did someone drop it off in the mailbox as a joke, to watch me believe that I actually had acquaintances? No, it can’t have been someone else.
            I rush to the trash can, which has yet to be taken care of. It’s overflowing, and to get to the bottom of it I have to dump everything on the floor. Strewn everywhere is garbage, the part of my life that gets thrown out. Boxes of food, books that I no longer use, paper wrappers, napkins, tissues – all my living supplies that have been used up and are now dead, ironically – and here it is. A big black cardboard box with DVORAK stamped on it in white letters. There’s a picture of an ink ribbon on the front, and the back holds the direction on how to replace the old with the new. The box is old; it came with the typewriter back when my mother died. But it has just been recently thrown away, which means that the ribbon has recently been replaced, and that also tells me that somewhere in this trash, there must be the old ribbon.
            I pull the flap on the top of the box, gingerly peeling it back like I did the envelope. There’s a Styrofoam carton that is the same size and shape as the rectangular box, so I grab the two sides that aren’t mashed too closely to the edges of the cardboard and slide it out. Inside a niche in the Styrofoam rests a rust-covered ribbon, just as I had suspected. I touch the ribbon, taking it out of its final resting place, to discover that the ink has dried up on it.
            I lie back in the trash, my home for now, to think about how I’ve so mislead myself, how the impossible has become possible, how I could forget something so crazy, and how I could have been so crazy to do it – regardless of whether to feel important, to feel noticed, or to feel loved, I wrote myself the letter in a fit of madness. To not remember is an act of insanity, but I must have been “sleeping” when I did it.
            I’m frightened to fall asleep again, worried about what I may have planned for myself when I come back from “dreaming.” But I close my eyes and rest, because the rain lulls me to sleep, as if a mother’s cooing voice to a baby, and also because I feel there is nothing left to do but wait.
            I sense the end of these troubles will soon be here. I draw an imaginary line with my finger along the ceiling, and place a caret at the end to form an arrow, pointing to the river that steadily flows faster outside.

No new reviews today. Last night, I went to go see my roommate and my friends' performance of George Washington Slept Here, and it was actually really… more