The Cartography of Absence
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The wallpaper was the first betrayal—peach instead of yellow, though I remember pressing my cheek against it while feverish, counting the roses. Yellow roses, always yellow. But these walls are peach, bare, watching me with the patient eyes of a place that has forgotten it was ever mine. They’re someone else’s walls now. The room is smaller, too, the windows and the desk too, the bed. It is a new bed, the metal headboard screaming its betrayal.
I walk through the room, my steps whispering on the carpet, dust rising up like ghosts at my heels. They’re all here, the ghosts, floating in the corners, staring at me. In my memory, there were three windows, but there is only one. They have all betrayed me.
Where are the unicorns? Where is the scrollwork of fantastical figures that I traced with my fingers every day? When did it all fade away, the white paint thickening with years and the abandonment of this place, this childhood shrine to my name, to my living?
It is so small. The years have swallowed my room and my name, have taken my birthright and shrunk it like Alice’s cake. I walk the five steps across the room, bumping into the bed that shouldn’t be here. I feel the walls closing in on me, peach closing in, closing in, I feel my throat start to close.
Not my room, not my room.
A moment before it begins to throb I imagine the scar on my head opening up and swallowing my brain whole, just sucking it back in with the clenching of the seam, the way a jellyfish closes in on a bite. The scar on my head is throbbing. The room is throbbing.
This isn’t my room.
My voice is higher than I expect, and the hands on the windowsill are mine but so young, so babyish, with bitten nails and smooth skin. I feel as if I am thirteen again, as if I am standing on the threshold of myself but stuck in time, my hands frozen and small while my brain expands and expands.
“You’ve grown so much,” says a voice behind me.
I turn. It is my mother, her hair white. I can’t remember when her hair turned white. It has always been white, since my accident, since I came back from the dead, from the hospital with its starched sheets and plastic tubes. I remember waking up, and her hair was white. It has always been white.
But it hasn’t. It used to be black. It used to be beautiful. And her hands used to be smooth.
“Hey, Mom,” I say, or I try to. But it comes out strange, strangled, in the voice of a child.
She smiles at me, a sad smile. “This isn’t your room anymore, Amelia. It’s a guest room.”
Not my room, I think. Not my room.
She is opening the door, taking me by the hand, leading me out. “Come have tea with me,” she says.
As I cross the threshold I look back and I see a ghost sitting on the bed, a small, thin girl with big eyes and a green sundress and a Band-Aid on her right knee. She smiles and waves.
Goodbye, she says. I have grown beyond you.
My feet shuffle obediently behind my mother’s. She leads me down the hallway that used to be a mile long, but now only stretches a few paces. How did it get so small?
“How is school?” she asks, pouring a cup of tea for me, no sugar. She never remembers that I like sugar.
“I’ve forgotten everything,” I say. “I can’t remember this place at all. My room is the wrong color, and it has the wrong bed in it.”
She shakes her head. “You haven’t forgotten everything. You remembered the roses. And the yellow.”
“Where did it go? The wallpaper? Why did you change it?”
She hands me the tea. “You were growing up. You didn’t want flowers in your room anymore. You wanted stripes.”
She smiles. “You don’t remember? You begged and begged for stripes.”
“But my room. Where did it go?”
She shakes her head, and her eyes are sad. I remember this look, but I don’t remember why. I don’t remember her hair before it was white.
“It went away, I suppose. It left with you when you went to school.”
“You mean I took it with me?”
She smiles, and her smile is so sad. “Yes, I suppose you did.”
I put my teacup down and put my head in my hands. “But I don’t remember taking it with me,” I say. “I don’t remember it at all.”
“You’ve grown, Amelia,” she says. “It was time to let it go.”
She thinks I don’t remember, but I do. I do remember, I remember things. I remember pressing my cheek against the wall and counting the roses. I remember the window that has vanished, the one that looked out on the bay, at the rolling of the white-flecked ocean. I remember the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title