Like Gravity(81)

Twenty-one: one of the biggest rights of passage for any young adult, especially on a college campus. Somehow, it held no appeal for me. I hadn’t actually celebrated a birthday in years and I didn’t plan to even mention this one’s arrival to Finn.

Maybe a part of that was because I’d had a fake ID since I was seventeen. Or maybe it was because I’d never enjoyed or even understood the concept of birthdays. They had always seemed rather pointless to me – just another meaningless demarcation of life’s value; society’s way of portraying our headless march toward the grave as some great gift, rather than an inevitability.

I mean, when you really think about it, aren’t birthdays just an opiate for mortality? Our way of saying, Congratulations! You’ve survived yet another year in this mess we call life. Here’s a piece of cake and a few balloons for your trouble.

I’d probably felt differently as a kid. Back when my mother was alive, birthdays had been the highlight of my year – filled with color and laughter, frosting and presents. Pi?atas strung up in the backyard if the weather was nice. A slightly lopsided pink princess cake, frosted to perfection. Presents piled high on the kitchen table. My mother’s voice soaring above the rest, as the partygoers chorused in time…

Happy Birthday, Dear Brooklyn…

Those days had come to a quick end after she’d died. I couldn’t remember my seventh birthday. I knew it had been spent in the foster home, but like so many of my memories from that time, it was locked somewhere deep and unnavigable within my psyche.

Dr. Angelini told me that I couldn’t force the memories to reveal themselves, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying. When I’d close my eyes and turn my thoughts inward, I could sense the memories there – as if they were hidden in the shadows of my mind behind a thick gauzy curtain. The answers I wanted lurked just out of reach, and sometimes I even thought I’d caught a glimpse of one behind that opaque mental drape – a flash of color, a faintly reminiscent scent, a vaguely familiar face.

I wanted to reach into my head and tear down that curtain. Hell, I would’ve taken a crowbar to my memories to pry them out, if I’d thought it would do me any good. But, since that didn’t seem like a viable option, they remained frustratingly inaccessible to me.

I’d taken a biology course during my first semester of college – an odious and inescapable science breath requirement – and I remembered the days I’d spent hovering over the microscope, turning dials and adjusting light intensities as I tried to bring the microorganisms on my slides into view. The other kids in my class hadn’t batted an eye at the task, effortlessly illuminating their samples. Try as I might, though, I could never get the damn thing to focus.

Sadly, looking into the contents of my own brain was strangely reminiscent of those infuriating days in the biology lab.

Finn would have understood – if I’d told him, that is. I think he knew there was something going on with me, something more than just the attack or Gordon’s supposed innocence.

He would have been kind. Sympathetic. Helpful, even.

But how do you tell the person you love that you don’t even know your own mind? That there are parts of yourself, aspects of your soul – your innermost thoughts and memories – that you’ve blocked out or simply forgotten? That your brain doesn’t function normally – and that maybe it never will?

Things were good between us – great, actually. I was happy. Even more shockingly, I seemed to make Finn happy too. And, perhaps selfishly, I didn’t want to undermine that happiness. I didn’t want him to look at me differently, to treat me differently. So I held back.

At least, that’s the reason I gave myself to excuse my nondisclosure.

Because, just maybe, if I were really being honest, there was the inescapable fact that I myself wasn’t ready to face the dark questions that had begun to swirl through my mind – a violent maelstrom of suspicion and foreboding and inconceivable possibilities.

Sometimes the mind puts things together in an instant; a hundred pieces of the puzzle that have been lying scattered across the floor suddenly snap together like magic and the whole picture comes swiftly clear. Until that moment of clarity, though, you stare at those goddamn pieces so long they begin to blur out of focus, feeling like you must be missing those vital pieces that hold all the answers.

The truth was, on all those quiet nights of normalcy, my mind had begun to wander over all of the things that had been happening to me recently. I stared at all those pieces of the puzzle, lying on my carpet with seemingly no connectable edges or even a discernable pattern amongst them. I thought about the things I’d dismissed as nothing at the time, shrugged off as no big deal or stuffed down into the corners of my mind that I avoid looking at too closely, for fear of their contents.

But I couldn’t ignore the fact that there had been entirely too many strange incidents lately to be merely coincidental. Not anymore.

I’d sat on my rooftop looking up at the stars – late autumn constellations had always been my favorite, though I wasn’t sure why – and thought about the attack. And then, almost involuntarily, my mind shifted to examine all the anonymous phone calls I’d received.

Then, the eerie sensation I’d experienced more than a few times of being watched as I walked home or made my way across campus alone.

Then, the bizarre and still-unexplained black rose delivery – an apparent harbinger of my death.