Creative Writing "Infinite Loop"

I have to say, before we begin, that I am terrible with memories. My head doesn't carry events to be recalled in a linear fashion, but a haphazard collection of feelings and sights that last for a split second and no more. In fact, for some of them, they don't even last for that second. These things are immeasurable by time, because how do you measure an emotion with time? How do you measure a sight with time? How do you measure a person, a relation? These are the things my memories are made of – fractions, raw materials and residue that didn't quite make it through the system and lingers. It's all made up of non-linear snippets and moving pictures set on an infinite loop. It's difficult to choose which one to look at, to try and expand – data must be filled in, falsely, to make it understandable.

I suppose I could generalize, of course. Generalizing is a way to expand without lying, a way to catch particulates in a great big bag and say, "Yes, here we have a memory."

So, to begin.

The setting: ten years, half of my life, ago in the front yard of the house I grew up in. The characters: my self, my friend, and the many insects that visit outdoorsy children in the heat of Florida summer. The plot: a lie that I didn't know was a lie, boxes full of my childhood, and a move just around the block.

The day was bright and wonderful (and though I could say that jaunts down Nostalgia Lane such as this always seemed to be cast in a beautifully sunny glow in spite of reality, it was Florida, in June, at noon, so I have quite a chance of being correct in this case) and tomorrow, I would be in a new house. So many people talk of Moving Day like it is this awful, awful thing but I was lucky. The new house was just around the block, a familiar place where my grandmother once lived, with larger rooms than the ones here and a fridge that made crushed ice so I could turn Kool-Aid into slushies.

My friend was with me. Her four sisters had already taken a trip to the new house to help my mother unload boxes. They were all my friends – five girls, five sisters that allowed me to be the sixth. She held a box in her hand and I helped her situate it in the bed of my father's truck, and there was a brief moment of silence as bugs buzzed and the heat seemed to buzz a little, too. I could feel it on my skin.

"I don't want to be helping you move away," she told me.

"It's just around the corner," I replied, full of childish honesty in the face of an unknown lie: "We'll still all be best friends. We'll hang out every day."

We didn't; out of sight, out of mind. Close curtain. The end.

The memory is stained with a regret I can't remove, with the loss of not one, but five friends whom I'd shared everything with. I don't know if it was childhood carelessness or something else I can't bare to name that got between us. This is the trouble with memories, you know. There's always this sadness with them.

Either you sadly pine for the days when all you wanted was a fridge that could crush ice so you could turn your Kool-Aid into slushies, or you regret that you didn't know to want more.