digging through the sock drawer of memory

leaving is living, after all

I.

I called my father two weeks before booking my ticket and told him I’d be visiting for a little while. That was a good decision, if only for seeing the smile on his face during that pixelated Facetime call. I sometimes think I rewrite my memory to be a tighter, more polished thing — like I’m cutting out all the excess as I revise. A study conducted in 2012 on memory reactivation revealed that we are changing memories every time we go and “retrieve” them. Researcher Donna Bridge says, “A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event, it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it.” Everything in my brain is malleable, I imagine that all my memories are patterned socks and every time I look for the pair I want to put on, it has a new little pattern that wasn’t there before, perhaps one of the stars and hearts on it is now missing, or maybe the color has changed from light blue to pale yellow. Everything I do is rooted in remembrance, in the act of retrieving something. Even visiting Karachi again, smelling the oud on my father and holding my cat in my lap against his will, all of this works in tandem with the continuous movement of my mind-hands, shuffling inside the sock drawer, digging them out one by one until the entire floor is scattered like a maximalist art display.

It’s a bit strange, he said, that you’re leaving the night before your birthday. Ah, the birthday — the word itself evokes images of cats sitting around a birthday cake placed on a polka-dot tablecloth, of party hats and the golden glow of slender candles, of honey-cake and carrot-cake and chocolate mousse and everyone’s many opinions on fondant, of stars like freckles smattered across the Earth’s blue face, of an unrelenting gratitude beneath the heaving, moaning and groaning of “figuring my life out.” I have always loved birthdays, their sharp, defined expression of joy, their colors and even their heavy-handed existentialism. Joan Didion wrote that she was twenty-eight when she realized not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. I think I’m realizing the same thing. My big moments can’t always be perfect little images captured in the city I grew up in, I know in my heart of hearts it’s time to cut the thread that ties me so tightly to the idea of an old life. I tell my father the ticket on the day of my birthday was quite expensive, which is true, but it is also true that I wanted to grow older outside of Karachi.

Kelly Pringle

II.

I was there for a week that felt like a year. It’s a privilege when weeks slow down because when I look back at the endless repetition of my life and think of how much time has passed, I feel nauseous. Our hippocampus is responsible for “editing” our memories, a built-in video-editing tool that you don’t have to pay a subscription fee for and it “updates” everything in the context of our present moment. All this cutting and snipping and reframing of my ‘mind-journal’ makes it quite difficult to know what really happens to me or how I really feel. In my diary, I wrote pages and pages about how being back felt like holding a sweet-and-sour candy in my mouth but tasting a less intense flavor. I feel it now too, a slight but concrete distance between me and the past, like someone’s wedged a heavy book between us but now and then the pages become translucent and allow me to feel in glimpses how I once felt.

III.

Outside our house, a new kitten had arrived days before me. My mother was strict in her instructions: do not get attached to him. A small but vivacious (yes) group of stray cats is cared for by us, a responsibility my father and I took on by taking them to the vet, getting their shots and feeding them boiled chicken and high-grade cat food that seeks to bankrupt us. Naturally, my mother wanted no more membership holders of this support program. But I spent most of my time outside, holding Cheeku (yes) in my lap and teaching him new tricks, like how to scratch my phone and bruise my elbows. A year ago, I would’ve been fearful of this attachment, of knowing I was growing to love one more thing I would have to leave but leaving is inextricable from living. In Invisible Cities, Calvino says that for those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. I’ve been trapped by my city all those years of living there and now that I’ve left, I’m trapped in the echo of it. I spend hours trying to stitch a new person together, but I’m still held in the past’s giant, calloused fist. If I have to live here in either mind or body, why not fall in love with cats and trees and flowers and my parents and my tired, moldy old house?

IV.

When Mariyam and I were younger, our families used to say you girls spend all your time together, and then you’re on call all day! Every time we’re together in real life, it’s the most natural thing in the world, like breathing or scribbling something on your arm. I often ask her the same questions I ask myself — in a way, we’ve shifted from mirrors to sisters. We rummaged through Karachi like toddlers trying to grab hidden toys from an endless ball pit, our backs softened with sweat and the edges of our shalwars tinged muddy from walking through the day in sandals. We ate masala dosa and gave our opinions on things that mattered little to either of us, but sometimes the only thing you need in this world is a conversation with your best friend in the pale light of the evening moon, with a fat housecat meowing in the distance, saying I HOPE YOU BOTH ARE FRIENDS FOREVER AND CAN I HAVE SOME CHICKEN PLEASE?

V.

These days, I hear back from literary journals quicker than I used to. I don’t write as many poems, but I spill pages of prose on Google Docs. I think of Laila and Amir, two characters I wrote to mirror me and someone I used to love. I see that over the years, they too have changed. I hope my year of blanket rejections has concluded and that I’m entering into my year of tiered rejections (the email makes all the difference). Maybe I’m one step closer to an MFA, to writing for the rest of my life. But maybe I’ll do that either way.

VI.

I felt a searing joy the day of my birthday, sitting on a table surrounded by some of my closest friends in not-Karachi and breaking open a soft tiramisu slice with a cold silver spoon. The restaurant waitstaff sang me a happy birthday and I grinned ear-to-ear, a smile I’ve only just started loving (thanks to two orthodontists in different countries). The lamps came on as soon as the sky turned a deeper shade of blue and the restaurant manager said they’re from Europe and that he counted them every single night before he left. We laughed and played card games and I was wearing knee-length boots that I thrifted from Zainab Market and my hair fell in place after the morning blow-dry and I felt so present in my body, in the moment, like I was spilling in all directions in the soft orange light, the laughter of my friends like an orchestra of joy, the tiramisu like a star melting in my mouth.

VII.

Maybe a few years from now, when I think back to this birthday, I’ll re-edit the memory again. Sometimes, even writing things down doesn’t preserve them as they were; the images are always losing their hue as I age. But more than any three-dimensional, high-resolution mind-photograph, I want to preserve only the feeling: stitched like thread into the sock-drawer, a pair I’ll keep pulling out no matter how the patterns shift, so I can keep walking a little further from Karachi, a little closer to myself.

---

thanks for reading this! “cut the cheesecake already” is reader supported, in that the readers support me emotionally. so consider subscribing for free to show support!