You can go home again, but don't (feat. Cathy P)

[markcmarino]

You can go home again 

 

As we sat in our Internet silence, without even a whisper of wifi, Cathy sat reading over some sort of card with writing on it that a Federal delivery person had sent to her.  What’s that? asked Jeremy. It was from an old friend of hers back in Swaziland where she had spent her youth.  After reading this card sent through the post, Cathy turned it over and stared at the picture a while and said, Thomas Mann said you can never go home again.  But you know what’s worse than that?  If you could.

 

Jane Smalley was able to go home again – after she received a wish from a genie or a shooting star or a little tyrant who is it obsessed with making people guess his name.  But not just go home in a physical sense but go home in the temporal sense – back to the way things were when she turned that hateful age of 13.  Back before her room changed from pretty in pink to bleakest black.  Back when the only part of her body that was pierced were her ears.  When she still had stuffed animals on her bed and before her room flooded with patchouli and sandalwood.

 

Back to her hometown in South Dakota, where the only thing that changes is the walls of the Corn Palace.

 

Back to her parents being large and in charge.

 

Only things were different, too.  Her parents weren’t in the prime of their hair-losing, middle plumping middle ages, but were older now, with walkers and What’d She Say hearing loss and sagging sacks of skin and memories faded like old pictures, like blackboards that don’t hold the chalk anymore or are so clouded with old writing you can’t hardly read anything new.

 

Yet despite being old and entering their decrepitude, they still make ALL of her decisions and control her self-image don’t to the way she thinks about her not-smile.  And she finds, as she explores this home, that all her adult ambitions and discoveries have now been deflated and her mind is once again all duty and pleasing her parents.  

 

Of course, she recognizes this time, the exact moment she returned to.  This is when she encountered that rip tide on their beach vacation to Rehoboth.  And returning to that place now, pushing her parents in their off-road beach wheelchairs, she goes from being woke and awakened to that pleasant slumber of innocence.  Changing her torn jeans for a polka dot swimming suit, she goes from being a strong independent woman to being a sweet duty-bound dependent for whom the occasional question or complaint arises in her mind only as a slightly annoying beach fly, which she swats away only to wish vaguely that she had not.

 

You can never go home again, repeated Cathy, but if you could, you probably should not.

 

And with that we all stretched our creaky joints and felt a little of the Gubbitude that Scott had complained of several stories ago.

MM

[raygonne]

The Furmd? That Forgotten Wind

Or maybe it was the forgetting wind.

I’m still catching up with my email since the week the internet went down. Turns out people were saving everything to drafts, which all hit their outboxes as soon as the internet returned for us. Whew!

But how can I forget the weird weather stories I heard during that dark, dark week before the email storm hit!

Anyway, did I tell you the one about the memory erasing wind? It’s called, I think, the fumb. Or was it the furmd? Shirley told me about it. No, it was Leonard.

So this real mild breeze tiptoes through like a park or median strip or whatever and the hairs on your knuckles stand up and take a few bows and then WHOOSH this like brisk downcurrent buckles your knees and then… nothing. It’s like it was never there. And whatever you were just doing? Forget about it.

—Jeff T. Johnson

[raygonne]

Which is maybe also to say the return to email after the internet went down—the storm of the past that followed the storm of the recent un-present—is a sort of return of if not to the past, even if we were never at home in our inbox(es). Especially then.

Still not sure, though, if the internet outage was regional or global (but isn't the regional made up of the global now, or was it—still?—the other way around?). Where'd all those emails come from? Or, like, were we typing away before we knew there was nowhere to go, and we were auto-saved?

Wait, Mark, what were you just saying?

JJ

[Jeremy Hight]

You can go home again 

 

We sat in our Internet silence, without even a whisper of wifi, .  But you know what’s worse than that?  If you could.

 

 Return to childhood.  Go to that prom with that "perfect"  choice so only manifested in the rear view.  Leave the present to the past surely so warm and pristine.  Jump off the rails of that complex adulthood.  Reach inward to that tree house you forget you fell from that one summer evening.  Hit reset and jump from inside to the skin of that age

that surely was when all was working well together, when the touch of the world was gentle and kind, when time bloomed gardens, not their grow and decline.

Quantum that prom.  Butterfly effect that year so honey goo now in amber of past.  Reach into the bones of it all and pull backward...

  

 

You can never go home again, repeated Cathy, but if you could, you probably should not.Cathy sat reading over some sort of card with writing on it that a Federal delivery person had sent to her.  What’s that? asked Jeremy. It was from an old friend of hers back in Swaziland where she had spent her youth.  

After reading this card sent to the past, Cathy turned it over and stared at the picture a while, This conversation had actually been spoken many times, reset dozens of times back to surely be the best, at least better.

[Alex Mitchell]

As the draft from all the emails of the past week swept over her, snatching the card from her hand, Cathy realised she couldn't remember the name of her friend from Swaziland, or when she had last seen him (or was it her?). Outside, it began to rain, drowning her memories and nourishing the parched earth. The next morning she began packing, ready to head home for the last time.

[Jeremy Hight]

She left with a vague notion, pulling at her wrist as people once said, tugging at the very motes of dust behind the train wheels, the feel of her skin on the rattling windowglass,  the very text on the ticket stub she clenched just a little tight, just that little too long.  Soon enough with the miles it all evaporated clean.

[Rob Wittig]

Jean pushed back from the table -- another fantastic meal she'd whipped up without electricity -- and told this story. Where she gets her energy I'll never know!

I was spelunking when the furmd blew, she began. That's how I missed it, or it missed me. I scrambled back to surface when I heard the boom.

I could tell instantly that everyone on the surface had forgotten a bunch of short-term stuff. Everybody was talking about it. Parking lots full of people trying to find their cars. People sitting in restaurants, pissed that their dates hadn't arrived. Or happily having a solo meal and surprised when their date showed up.

But it took a lot longer for me to cotton to the fact that something bigger had been forgotten. I really, really realized it the moment I looked at one of those silly cat pictures on the web and made a sound -- a kind of up and down squeezing, singing sound. The sound just came out of me automatically when I saw the picture, like it always did. And I showed the cat to a coworker. Nothing. No reaction. Blank face. Another co-worker. Nothing.  I pantomimed being the cat for them and made the sound. No reaction.

After that I went around testing it everywhere. Watching a movie with my sweetie and one of those cat picture moments came on and I made the sound and I looked at him. Zero. As if nothing happened.

Then I tumbled to it. Everyone else had forgotten an emotion. A basic, hard-wired, brain science, human emotion. Gone. One of the important emotions, I think. Because I too, am beginning to forget. Last week I knew the name of it. I should have written it down. I'm starting to lose it, too. I can still make the sound, but I can't feel the feel. I think it had something to do with being nice to one another.

Well . . . we are now living in a meaner world. No doubt about that.

We sat silently in the candlelight, staring down the barrel of Jean's vision... the silence getting uncomfortable, until Jean herself laughed and broke her spell: "Who's on the dish crew? Time to clean up this mess!"

[Jeremy Hight]

Jean pushed back from electricity -- spelunking. 

I heard the boom.

 People trying to find their cars. People sitting in restaurants, but something bigger had been forgotten.

 I  made a sound -- a kind of up and down squeezing, singing sound. The sound just came out of me automatically

After that I went around testing it everywhere. Watching a movie with my sweetie and one of those cat picture moments came on and I made the sound and I looked at him. Zero. As if nothing happened.

 Everyone else had forgotten an emotion. A basic, hard-wired, brain science, human emotion. Gone. One of the important emotions, I think. Because I too, am beginning to forget. Last week I knew the name of it. I should have written it down. I'm starting to lose it, too. I can still make the sound, but I can't feel the feel. I think it had something to do with being nice to one another. 

Well . . . we are now living in a meaner world. No doubt about that.

Empathy rained itself out last night.   It died like signal, like updraft, like forgetting,  like numbing;  it died into a digital sociopathy born of apps and immediacy, of life behind glass, of text over voice and touch.