My mom had left the country ten years ago for Paris, just because of the name. Of course she grew up when teleportation was just a scifi thing. So to her it was a wish machine. She never had the chance to even leave the country, let alone go to another continent, and now she could go anywhere in the world. So she picked Paris even though she didn't know a thing about it that she hadn't learned from a movie or a book. And -- she turned out to be really happy there. It was exactly what she was looking for.\n\nI miss the house I grew up in, though. I only started to about five years after she sold the place, but I really do miss it now. Though if I had it back it would be a relief. Once you've lost something you can't really get rid of that feeling of loss.\n\n<<back>>
"Christopher," you said. \n\nI didn't know what to say.\n\n"Christopher," you repeated. "I forgot you but when you called just now I remembered." You sounded so happy. \n\nAnd then I did something I shouldn't have.\n* [[I was honest]]\n* [[I told you what you wanted to hear]]
It was funny, dancing with you, because you only knew how to lead. (Though of course you didn't remember why.) When I pointed this out, we tried switching places but you got all turned around and we looked like two people dancing accidentally together, walking the same steps but in the opposite direction.
That's the word people always used after they met you. Normally it's just a blank-word, a placeholder you use when you're mouthing the pleasantries everyone has to. But everyone used that word, 'nice,' and it was true. You were kind, not only kind to people you knew but everyone. And that's really hard. I never understood how you could do that.\n\n<<back>>
"Hi, this is Val, or Val's phone, maybe both of us really," your voice said. "Leave us a message and I'll call you back."\n\nBeep.\n\n"Hi... it's me," I said. "Call me when you have time. I'm sorry for calling so late."\n\nI hung up and walked onto my balcony to think. It was nearly summertime so it was cool and breezy out, and I could hear the city still awake around me. The city calms me. From where I lived, its lights spread out below like a starfield, a mirror to the night sky. I could never pick out individual neighborhoods. Instead it was just a mass of light and life. I sat for a long time just listening and looking, maybe hours, who knows, I drifted off at one point and started to dream of [[being home]] again and [[young]]. \n\nThen [[my phone buzzed]].
-- which was inexplicable to me, because that was how I noticed you first, a clear sonorous voice hidden in a bar full of loud talk. I wonder if our ears are tuned to people, whether your ears can hear the people you love more than anyone else, even before you love them. I fell in love with you quickly. I trusted you as soon as you turned and said hello.\n\n<<back>>
I'm forty-one.\n\nI don't like telling people this because first of all I don't look like I'm that old, I think because I'm so clean shaven, and secondly because I still feel like I'm maybe eight years behind everyone else my age. I already know I won't get married. Even in an age where people live til 150 I'm too old to get married. But I still kind of hope that I can have a child, somehow. \n\n<<back>>
!!Remembered\n!!!by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>>\nI had run out of [[teleport credits]] for the month so all I could do was talk to you on the phone. You hated talking on the phone, too, because you hated [[the sound of your own voice]], and even though I loved you dearly, more than [[my mom would ever know]], I started to dread calling you. But I couldn't stop, you know? Because the moment I stopped talking to you I knew [[you would forget me]].\n\nI was lazy, too, and I could always find a reason why not to call, week after week, until I had a weird sort of semi-panic attack one night while I was going to sleep, and decided I had to call you, even if it was two o'clock in the morning, because you really might have forgotten me, really you might have. And I didn't know how I could bear that.\n\nI kept the lights off so I could pretend I was somewhere else, maybe nowhere really, while we talked, and listened to [[the phone ringing]] over across the continent.
You were in Seattle when the bombs hit, though you couldn't tell me how or why. The radiation had curdled your memory so that almost nothing stuck. For some reason only sound would keep the book of your memory bound together: little things, like the way bags of potato chips would pop when you opened them and the clack of closing your cell phone. You always kept a tape recorder with you, would fall asleep to your life's mix tape. I tried to get you to add me to your recording, just me saying something dumb like hello but you wouldn't, you said you weren't ready and I respected that.\n\n<<back>>
I don't think of myself as a sad person, not even a pessimistic one. But people describe me that way all the time. I wonder if there are signs I give off without meaning to, a sadness I carry that has no weight.\n\n<<back>>
I kept my loves secret from my mom, because I thought she had enough heartbreak in her life already. She didn't need mine too. I was unlucky at love. I mean, I never lacked for people to fall in love with but I always got it wrong somehow, and not in any dramatic kind of way. Things always just sputtered out, like a sparkler at the Fourth of July -- it doesn't explode or die in one big burst of light. It just dies in your hand and you drop it to the ground.\n\n<<back>>
Remembered
At my job they gave you enough to go anywhere on the earth twice a month; if you saved them up, you could go to the moon three times a year, which is what most of my coworkers did. It was a nice enough place, I'd been a couple times, but what the hell -- I blew my credits on cut-rate transcontinental trips to see you. It meant we could have dinner once a week.\n\nThis month, though, things were all screwed up. I had to use half my allowance on a business trip because I forgot to fill out the paperwork on time -- I am always forgetting these kind of things -- and so I was stuck in my home city, wasting away my nights with whatever crappy local culture I could find.\n\n<<back>>
It was you.\n\n"Hello?" I said.\n\n"Yes, someone at this number called my phone while I was asleep," you said.\n\n"Uh, yes," I said. "That was me."\n\nThere was a pause and then you asked, "Do I know you?" You had forgotten me. I was too late. I had waited too long and now I was gone from your mind.\n\n"No," I said. "I think I made a mistake. I was trying to call a friend. A -- guy I mean, so it can't be you."\n\n"Okay," you said. "Well, have a good night anyway." You said it [[so nicely]].\n\nI hung up, put the phone on the balcony next to me, closed my eyes, and sighed. I know it sounds dramatic but I really do sigh a lot. I guess you could think of it as exhaling all the stress and doubt built up in me. I mean, I don't look at that way myself but [[people tell me]] that's what it sounds like. My mind felt blank, is all I can really say. Just like that, it was all gone, everything I had with you. I felt sad but I knew it was going to happen, and that's a harder kind of sadness to have, I think. There isn't any shock to cushion you from it. You just fall into it, deeper and deeper.\n\nI had to do something so I went inside and brushed my teeth. It must have been three or four o'clock. I hate how routine things can feel so melodramatic when you're sad. You're just brushing your teeth and somehow the up and down motions feel like you're scrubbing yourself clean, like it means something now. But it didn't. I decided to keep the sliding balcony door open and sleep on my couch, so that I could feel the breeze. And just as I laid down on the couch I heard this strange insecty kind of noise, and I couldn't figure out what it was until I realized: [[my phone was vibrating on the ground]] again.
"Yes," I said. "It's me."\n\n"I can't believe it," you said. "This is the first time I remembered anything like this. I always forget--"\n\n"I know," I said. "I thought you had forgotten, too."\n\n"I didn't," you said. And then-- "I love you."\n\n"I love you too," I said, and of all the lies I would tell you afterwards, of all the stories I would invent to make you think I was this man you had never spoken of, of all the magic I would try to work on you to make you forget who I was and remember me as someone new, someone you could remember -- this wasn't one of them.\n\nI knew that everything would fall apart someday, and probably sooner than I would like. I knew that you would hate me eventually for it, and you would probably never speak to me again once you did. But I wanted to burn. I could bear being extinguished.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
"No," I said. "My name isn't Christopher."\n\nThere was a silence and I added: "But I do know you."\n\n"Do you know him?" you asked.\n\n"No," I said and sort of half-laughed. You sounded like a little kid asking about an uncle she'd never met. "You've never mentioned him before."\n\nThere was another silence and this time I let it be.\n\n"Do I love you?" you asked with the same tone of voice you had used when you asked if you knew me at all. I could have said anything then. [[I'd never had that power]] with you before.\n\n"I don't know," I said. And then without thinking, I added: "But I love you."\n\nAnd you said: "Tell me, I'll remember."\n\nI didn't entirely believe you. I'm sorry for that. But I also didn't care. I told you our story, the good parts and the bad. I had never glued it all together in my head before, and it was amazing. I could see it all in one thread, all making sense finally, all as it ought to be. And when I ended the story, I wasn't really coming to an end. I was only leaving a space for you to begin.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>