Forget-me-not is the colloquial denomination of a genus of flowering plants in the Boraginaceae family.
Years later you read in a magazine that something similar to false memory syndrome exists, where you only know about an occurrence through tales, or a photograph perhaps, but the more you hear the story or see the photograph the more you will think of it as naturally grown. You want to remember in emotion, and color, and so you add them, one by one, until nothing suspicious remains.
Your own first fabricated memory too was peeled off a photograph. A small you outside in a colorful raincoat on a colorful meadow under a grey sky—bleached out analogues. You added movement, then emotion, and never sound. You enjoy that it now runs like a cheap homemade vhs tape whenever you want it to because it is also the first memory of the house, the house in the countryside, the countryside, a place you had never been to before, or that you at least do not recall from short day trips in your earlier life, being carried around and pushed places because you were four years old and you were born in a city where nature is playgrounds, and other people’s pets, and touching vegetables in a supermarket but this memory is significant for being the first of many you would make in that same place, so it is good that the first is a bright blue sea of forget-me-not on a cold spring morning, only two hours from the city, which sounds so much less than it is. You want it to be the first because it is pretty, it is quiet, it is you and your skin collecting dew drops while you run saturated streaks of blue and green and your own small white shoes into your field of vision, possible because your eyes are too slow to separate your steps from the ground and you like how looking down, your gaze locked in motion, makes you feel dizzy and you’d run until you couldn’t run any longer and your lungs were soaked with cold mist and you breathe out spheres of soil and forget-me-not.
Now, you know your first memory of the house with the garden, the house in the countryside, is not real precisely because the image cuts off so that it is not the image of a child in a raincoat barely taller than the wet grass looking at the butt crack of a man dressed in black bent over ripping the bright blue flowers from the earth, a man you would eventually know as Franz who ran the only guesthouse slash tavern only a ten-minute walk down the hill with his wife Maria. Franz, an old choleric farmer who would suddenly and unexpectedly scream at Maria or his children or his grandchildren in a high-pitched but not at all terrifying voice. Franz who would sometimes ask other men in the tavern to buy him porn magazines from the gas station that you and other kids would then steal and giggle about in the stable or in the abandoned cabin next to the duck creek. Franz, who you once saw take a meowing bucket to the river that came back silent, Franz, who’d become much more quiet with age and whose death you don’t remember. Franz, who stood there that first day, unkempt, speaking loudly in a language you couldn’t place so that your parents had to later explain what a “dialect” is. Naturally, you assumed, you would be able to understand him the next time he came over, now that you knew and you confronted your parents in a rage when his words remained intelligible and you demanded to learn dialect but they’d simply say “You can’t learn that, you’ll just have to get used to it”, and that was devastating news. All the other retired farmers who came to help repair the house sometimes were the same, and only when they brought their wives to plant things in the garden you’d come out for their raspberry cake because they tried much harder to speak clearly around you. It would take you a long time to get used to it and you avoided everyone, reading many summer holidays away wherever your mother put a blanket in the garden so you wouldn’t stay in bed all day.
The more summer holidays passed the more you felt boredom oozing out of all corners of the house, seeping through the ceiling and being blown into your face with the warm summer breeze. You have not grown much older but old enough to feel a kind of boredom that could neither be dispelled by sour peaches from the swimming pool store, nor from breaking into the slate mine to watch the sunset, not even from secretly smoking a stolen Marlboro Red in the woods and brushing your teeth seven times before your mother returned from the hardware store, where she’d shop the right shade of laquer for the wooden fence around the vegetable garden and it is that freshly painted fence 13-year-old you leans on, in large worn out mum-clothes she gave you for painting, thinking all memories countryside you can come up with, first to now, wondering if you are about to die because you saw a film once where the protagonist’s life flashes before his eyes just like a film before he jumps off a skyscraper.
Asking your father back then if you really would see your life pass in front of you like that as you die he answers that it’s just a last desperate attempt to save yourself from death, that your brain goes through all scenarios it has ever lived through, to find a way out in one of them.
“So Grandma can’t do that because she has Alzheimer’s?”
“I don’t think she minds that, sweetheart.”
“Well, does it work?” you ask.
“Usually not,” he replies.
Alzheimer’s, no memory syndrome.
“Why don’t you go read something?”
And you went and read something.
And then he died of a brain stroke and proved his own words so that now you cannot ask any longer and you cannot go read something. You feel sick of the same singular road down to the village and the paths that lead off the road and suddenly your head is overflowing with flashes of secret houses in the woods, small branches scratching your face and the alcoholic breath of the wife beaters who helped your mum cement things and who make unpleasant comments about your eyes, and since a year ago, your clothes too, the same old men who never change except for getting older and dying, leaving behind wives who are secretly relieved and dare not say so but they do smile more once they’re widows. You think of furry lifeless baby kittens and putting piles of dung into hunters’ deer stands, trying to catch trout in an icy river, being cold, watching stars, trying to touch a large black snake on the steep hillside of a forest glade and your friend pushing you away and all that means you might die and . . . and then you stop. And then you know what to do.
And you tell your mother you have a stomachache and that you have to sleep early.
And you wait until you cannot hear her any longer and then you wait until you cannot wait any longer. You lock your door from the inside, you put all your savings into your yellow backpack and climb onto the window sill.
And then, with a muffled sound,
you jump
into nettles
and run.
Nina Dillenz studied theatre, film and media studies at the University of Vienna and despite writing a horrid paper on master aesthetic/homeboy Schiller’s definition of the pathetic and the sublime as transplanted to Kill Bill once, eventually graduated with a Master of Arts. Somewhere along the way she stumbled into China through orchestra management and decided rather than soiling Friedrich Schiller’s memory she’d start Chinese Studies as a second major, which she never completed, moving to China instead in 2015 as assistant to artistic management at the Tianjin Grand Theatre and in 2016 on to Harbin as a stage photographer for the Harbin Grand Theatre. Since 2017 she works as deputy head of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Beijing. Recently she increasingly devotes her free time to the realization of her own creative work with video, visuals, theatre and writing. The confines of identity, ideology and memory as much as their perceived inflexibilities are a constant source of inspiration, as well as a thing to break away from in creating images that can speak for themselves, freely.
Spittoon Monthly publishes one exceptional short story or set of poems on the first Monday of every month.