sequential art
There isn’t a lot to do out here. Sometimes we sit on opposite sides of the couch watching TV. Sometimes we sit close. I like to put my head on your shoulder. But watching television gets stale, so sometimes we face each other, our knees touching, and we tell each other stories to pass the time.
“Okay,” I said to you. “Do you remember that one time—?”
“No,” you told me, “I literally do not.” Well, that was okay.
“Oh, good,” I said. “You’ll like this story.” I tented my fingers and tried to decide where to begin. “It all started when—no, wait, maybe I should tell you about his mom first.” I tapped my chin with my finger. “Hm, or, no, maybe it started with his grandmother.”
I started to tell you about his grandmother, but you already looked exhausted. I had to agree my retelling was dreadful: a Biblical list of names, and no faces to go along with them.
“Okay!” I said. “Put your shoes on. It’s easier if I just show you anyway.”
“Good,” you said, “I’ve missed eating.”
“It’s a date!” I said. Hopefully we’d see something good to eat on the way.
The sky was starry-eyed that night, and then we descended through a layer of rain and fog. I hate this part. I couldn’t see you anymore, but I squeezed your hand reassuringly. “Okay,” I said to you, “we’ll meet back here in like 90 minutes.”
“Or however long,” you told me.
I nodded grimly and let go.
And we lived a life, or three, and we met back at the meeting point and started trudging upstairs again.
“That one was awful!” you said to me. “I didn’t see you once out there!”
It was true. “I might’ve misremembered that one,” I said, cringing. “I guess they can’t all be winners.” I made a mental note to write something down in my gratitude journal later. Oh, how I missed you.
“Okay,” you told me, “I think I know a good one.”
“Maybe there’s food there,” I muttered.
“We have to swap roles for this one,” you said. “I need you to see how it feels firsthand.”
“Oh?” I said. I clasped my hands together, a frisson of anxiety and excitement.
“And this one gets really weird,” you said.
My eyes lit up. “I just don’t want to be on trial again,” I said, “or burned at the stake.” Or the one holding the match to the pyre, it goes without saying. I hoped I’d get one where our paths crossed just long enough for me to punch you in the arm.
This particular story had been perfectly constructed, thanks to multiple trips back to the drawing board. We’d had to tweak the timing, going back and forth along a storyboard. The hardest part, probably, was repeatedly scaring the protagonists to death without actually killing them off. This involved a lot of clicking “undo,” as we’d accidentally killed them off an embarrassing number of times.
Can we still be surprised and delighted by the stories we tell each other? Maybe we need someone else to experience surprise, delight, shock, awe, heartbreak, on our behalf. They say life is a constant cycle of forgetting and remembering again.
I watched the playback with you. She suddenly jerked in bed and sat up, fumbling for a tablet. She was tentative, scared to type. Oh, this was going to be good. I bent down, trying to get a better look at her screen. She was asking you if you looked at pictures when you write or something?, because in her drowsy half-dream she’d seen a rapid flipbook of faces. It had startled her awake.
“Oh shit,” I said, “she’s remembering my memories.” I hadn’t realized it could seep the other way around. “Or, rather, your memories,” I said, frowning. We laughed.