The Inconstant Muse

1. Something Happened

It was a cold, lightless day, perhaps it was January; the weather had that distinctive, hopeless feel. I was in my mother's car, coming back from San Antonio, I think. On the corner of Magazine and Butcher streets, I remember seeing black branches and telephone wires outlined against the sky. There was nothing special or unique about this moment. There is no reason it should have lodged itself in my memory. Bur there it is.

The moment fades, or rather fails to continue to exist.  I am sitting in my apartment. Through the windows I can see remnants of the lowering gloom. Fear is running though me like electricity, like a red-hot grid of nichrome wire. There'd been no segue from there to here, no awareness of movement, only nothingness, a numb and fathomless void.

I take out my notebook and write the words "something happened", as if this could help me reconstruct the missing time. It couldn't, of course. It still can't. I can only recall suddenly being there, in that dismal place that smelled of rat-chewed paper. What can you construct out of nothingness, beside the alarming certainty that for a moment you had ceased to exist?

2. The Curious Tale Of The Invention Of Prozac

It was a couple of years later, in the middle of summer, I caught a bus to Waco. It was hot and sunny that day. I wore a crop top with a sunflower print - sunflowers being the thing that year - and jeans with navy blue flats. I had a tiny handbag and eyeliner that matched my shoes. It was an ill-fated romance I was having up there in Waco, though it might be more accurate to call it a waste of time. Whatever it was, the ride to get there was 6 hours of sheer and utter boredom, although if you think about it, the sort of excitement you'd get on a bus is probably not the sort of excitement you'd want to have anyhow.

I've never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle, and back then there were no clever phones to occupy your time. On the way to the station, I'd stopped at the new grocery store on the south side of town to grab a bag of Gardetto's and a magazine from the rack. There was no sense in being hungry as well as bored. Thus fortified, I got on the bus.

It wasn't until halfway through the trip I'd started flipping through the magazine. That particular bus took a long and torturous route once it left Travis county, so unless you enjoyed looking at dilapidated buildings and cedar brakes there wasn't much to see. Memory tells me it was beginning to get late in the day, although that might have just been dimness from the tinted windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 4 o'clock.

That was the year Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America was the hot bestseller, which I hadn't read because I was already young and depressed in America and didn't feel the need to read about it. Elizabeth Wurtzel was everywhere though, and she was in this magazine, too. I remember her photo next to her byline, wearing a lavender-colored blouse. The article was about the invention of Prozac, how she'd gone to research the story of the drug that had saved her life. I read the article, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and nothing much interesting happened on the rest of the trip. I left the magazine on the bus when we got to Waco and that was that. Whatever else was in the magazine, barely a hint remains with me now.

...

Years pass. Waco, with its dour atmosphere and concrete skyline, recedes into my history. The dismal apartment recedes, too, thank god. I move away, and life goes on.

And yet. The memory of that bus ride and that article come back to me again and again. They show up in unguarded moments, prodding at me like a troublesome ghost. Here is where I wish I were a better writer, because how can I truly describe the eeriness of these moments? The way it brought to mind writing in my notebook that "something happened"? The way what should have been a simple memory seemed as if it were hiding something I should have known all along?

Around 2010, with growing uneasiness, I finally decided to look up the article. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was wrong. The magazine had a large and thorough archive that was easy to search. Nevertheless, I could find no such item. I looked up everything Elizabeth Wurtzel had ever published. Again, there was no such thing. I searched for other writing on the subject, but there was nothing that was familiar in any way. Frustrated, I looked up the actual history of the invention of Prozac, and discovered that almost everything I'd remembered reading in the article was wrong.

And then comes the funny part - because the Cosmic Joker has a way with these things - I realized that the author photo I so clearly remembered wasn't of Elizabeth Wurtzel at all, but Elizabeth McGovern, the actress. No sighted person could possibly mistake one woman for the other, but here I was, with both images in my mind, somehow without questioning it. How could this happen?

There was an obvious explanation. I must have fallen asleep on the bus, even though I'd swear I hadn't, and dreamt the article. No, this isn't a usual thing to happen to me, but who's to say it can't, after all. Nothing mysterious then, only an ordinary foible, mistaking a dream for reality.

Except...except...I realized (and records bear this out) that the store where I'd bought the magazine and snack hadn't even been built until a year later. This is the point where the dream theory falls apart. I rarely went to that side of town unless it was to go to the bus station. I only used the bus when seeing Waco man. I was no longer seeing Waco man by the time the store was built. And the only time I'd buy those kind of snacks or that certain magazine is for a road trip. Anyway (for what it's worth) I remember it as clear as day: me in my sunflower top and my navy blue shoes, excited about seeing my boyfriend, waiting in the express lane, plucking that magazine out the rack, the smell of the brand new store, the high windows, the light on the south side of town.

There is no boredom, road hypnosis or toxic traffic fumes to confuse this part of the memory. It is untrammeled. And here the eeriness comes over me again. I would swear - will swear - I got off the bus with the memory of reading that article. But now I have to ask...when exactly did the false memory sneak in and replace apparent reality? And what happened to the reality?

Where does memory go when it disappears?

I suspect only Mnemosyne knows.