Souvenirs (1) for Strangers

Roukia Ali, Canada

◀◀ Describe your earliest memory.

I’m three years old in a French academy preschool in Edmonton. My strict teacher, donning a helmet-like bob cut, paces back and forth in the aisle between the rows of desks, slapping a ruler into her palm with punctuating force. She is reciting numbers one to one hundred in a harsh French, eviscerating itself from her throat.

“Quatre-vingt-quinze—”

I am drawing moons in a notebook angled halfway out of my desk, each one opening with the crevice of a letter like an eye—celestial, curious brain for a moment all-knowing. The most egregious thing I can remember about her was her disdain for art, calling it a useless pursuit. It soured her to teach us the alphabet, finger painting, or to read us nursery rhymes and fables. The first day of school, she’d called me a “dizzy dreamer” because I told her literature was my favourite subject.

“R,” I say to myself softly in French, and she halts behind me. My tongue pushes around the English translation. “R?”

“Tu es partie à la lune?” She snaps. “Tête enfoncée dans les nuages, fille? Maths, hein? Pas anglais.”

“Pardon,” I say unapologetically. When she continues past me, I stick my tongue out at her back and move on to S.

◀◀ Describe something that happened yesterday.

Reewad and I make it a habit to watch a television show on the weekends to unwind from the stress that dictated the preceding rest of the week. We’ve settled on watching the anime Blue Lock right now, since it’s currently on its second season.

The hardest part about watching anime for him is that he absolutely can’t watch it in Japanese. He talks over the voices so he can read the subtitles aloud, trying to familiarise himself with the foreign language. This irritates me jokingly, because I’m trying to figure out what the hell a nutmeg is, or I’m struggling to remember a character’s name.

I’m currently attempting to comprehend the rules of the third selection arc we’re in.

“Read them in your head so you can hear their voices!” I keep squawking, half-laughing. “The English dub will be out next week; try to tolerate the subtitles!”

“They’re too fast!” he insists, before abandoning watching the show altogether.

I roll my eyes playfully and we change the show. “There. The Bear. That’s in English.”

He peers critically at Jeremy Allen White on the screen before settling back with an exaggerated huff. I mimic the sound to tease him, and then we fall into a comfortable silence—or as comfortable as it can be, seeing as we’re watching the man yell until he’s red in the face, and this is apparently relaxation.

Who cares what we’re watching anyway? I just like watching it with him.

◀◀ Describe something that happened five years ago.

It’s 2019—unbeknownst to us all, it will be one of the last recognisable memories we have of being together before a pandemic hits around six months later, and an entirely new world seems to emerge in its aftermath. I’m standing in the enormous line leading to Galaxyland’s infamous Mind Bender. The largest roller coaster in North America’s largest indoor amusement park.

“I’ve been on the Mind Bender!” I’m proclaiming, hands on my hips, a small crowd of my also waiting classmates congregated in awe around me. I think I look cool with my chest puffed out, the colossal sound of it rushing by behind me.

“And you didn’t die?” One of my classmates asks goonishly. “Didn’t an entire wedding party die on that thing?”

Smug, I crack open one eye. “I’ve been on it twice! I’m basically death-defying!”

“No way!” My best friend supplements beside me. “It goes upside down twice! I’m totally gonna vomit!”

“Did your glasses fall off?” Another classmate asks.

“Nope, I took ‘em off.”

When my best friend and I finally get our turn, a sudden prick of nausea deflates my bravado like a balloon. The memory of my screams rattling around in my teeth, sucking in air that seemed to implode from the speed, starts blooming an ache behind my temple.

“Are you sure we have to go?” I whine halfheartedly, knowing it was all she was talking my ear off about on the bus ride here. “I’m starting to remember it was lame!”

“No way!” She dismisses, her hands barely trembling as she straps herself in with a devilish grin. “We’re doing this!”

The older teenagers in the cart in front of us are reciting each other’s obituaries and pantomiming sobs. I realise then, truly, that I am screwed.

By the time we get off, I’m drowning in my own tears while my best friend is whooping all the way back to the main platform.

“Let’s go again, Kia!”

“I can’t feel my face!” I sob, rubbing maniacally at my eyes as she doubles over laughing.

⏯ Describe something you’ve completely forgotten.

The sound of my maternal grandfather’s voice.

Was it leathery, like the stripped and disheveled childhood couch I would sit on, bits of cushion tumbling out like clouds, thrashing on his lap because I could never stay still while he recited stories about his own childhood to me?

I can’t hear his voice, but I can feel the phantom pinch of his fingers against the peachy softness of my cheek. I can imagine the way he’d scold me to pay attention because “You’re going to grow up with no attention span and no morals.”

Was it soft like the way he would greet my mother, this big, rumbling man with the disposition of a bull, handling her like delicate china? I can hear her laughter because she’s still around, but I don’t think it was ever as joyous as when the man would lift her up and squeeze her in a bear hug, leaving a kiss on her forehead like a star dotting a night sky.

I can’t hear his voice, but I can see his wide grin, the ebony meat of his arms.

In forgetting my grandfather's voice, I feel as soon as he died when I was too young to remember it from brain cancer—a devastating phone call, a flatline, a last sag into the couch with an exhale bearing the weight of a thousand worlds—I began to mourn whatever French he took with him.

My aunt, his youngest daughter, would tell me that I had near-perfect French as a child, as a result of waddling after him, mimicking his words. I’d point to his coffee and newspaper combo, his shaving razor teetering on the bathroom sink, his worn business shoes, and wait for his baritone to carry the words to me.

“Café, journal, rasoir, chaussures.”

Every memory of him is a spelling test. Don’t let me forget how to string the letters together while the world is witness to my grief.

I resolved, when I was old enough and visited France at seventeen, to read his beloved copy of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” left untouched on his bookshelf in the years following his death. The shelf became my grandmother’s, and like everything he left behind for her, it came to symbolise her grief.

She stacked all her work papers, her Édith Piaf posters, and her little trinket statues around this book like a shrine—or even a blockade. When my hand went to retrieve the book, it brushed the top of an unframed photograph. It was of her, my aunt, and my mother, all gathered around him on a street corner while he held me in my obnoxious pink jumper in his arms. He and I are wearing the same squinting frown. I’m seven months old—it was my first visit to France.

My grandfather would read me philosophy as a baby, which in some way inspired my love for words as well as existentialism.

“Aujourd'hui, papi est mort.”

Camus’ penned words distort in my memory. Meursault's indifference towards the death of his mother morphs into my desperation to keep my grandfather. Still, I patiently worked through it—I let my mind be this slippery thing; I let everything hurt until it could heal.

“Dead” has never felt right to describe a voice. He’s not dead to me—just muted, zombified in my voice with no placeable accent. His memory is a movie on television in the dark of my mind, a flickering mouth pinched with static that demands that I, the writer, decipher the words.

I promise each time I pick up a pen that he will never have my silence. I will find some way to speak in the world, which to me, is to find some way to exist in it.

Je t’aime. Je suis encore là.

⏮ Describe your earliest memory.

The clacking of heeled black boots down the aisle.

“Quatre-vingt-quinze—”

I don’t regret loving literature—or, more accurately, the creation of it. I do grieve the days when words flowed naturally and could be without devastating purpose, the days when art wasn’t hierarchical in its sense, its emotionality, the point being made.

Maybe she was right to call me a dizzy dreamer, believing a pure love for the craft would just have to be enough. It didn’t make me ashamed to be called out. I just wish I couldn’t remember her—sharp from her tongue to her hair.

I wondered how people could get on with their lives when they didn’t have stories. Imaginary ones, real ones, it didn’t matter to me. Isn’t this the way you unfold a memory? Confuse it, maybe—sometimes you can’t remember what’s real. The things that sustain us may reveal themselves to be small fictions. But there’s a comfort in telling yourself something over and over, something that fundamentally stays the same yet has the ability to transmute itself.

It’s the only way I’ve coped with my memory fading. I can reinvent what things mean to me, and in this patience, there is a love that is never forgotten.

⏮ Describe something that happened yesterday.

I notice Reewad more often than I do the shows.

We’re sitting together shoulder to shoulder. My back aches, a mass of stress assembled at the base of my spine and between my shoulder blades. I count each individual eyelash that fans out over the top curve of his cheeks.

Seeing how his eyes widen at a goal one of the characters accomplishes in the sports anime is much more interesting to me than the goal itself, the character’s artificial reaction to it, rehearsed and read off a script, on screen.

Jeremy Allen White’s yelling is distilled in Reewad’s soft breathing, the up-and-down lilt of his small chest.

I’ve realised lately that I have a paralysing death phobia. I think about it all the time. As a result, I look at people as if they will fall dead at my feet any second now—even the occasional interesting stranger. Which is to say, I have been looking at people as if my heart is going to pop quiz me on whatever I can recollect about them, death like a timer ticking behind my eyes, inescapable. I don’t want to wake up one day with a heartbeat that sounds like the baseline underneath a voice I once cherished, this half-recollected thing, that asks me with every thud against my chest if I remember it.

I want people to ask me, “Have you forgotten?” and have the impossible peace of mind to answer, “No.”.

Grief, however, doesn’t care if your mind is a steel trap or how often you resolve that you will be brave when staring mortality in the face. I will remember those shows. Everything else will be the artifice—something I loved so deeply in the moment that there’s no universe where it couldn’t eventually be painful.

The next time Reewad reads the subtitles out loud, I don’t want to think this is something I could talk about in a future where he dies before I do. Something I must desperately note, like an anecdote I can keep in my pocket, pretending it’s the same as the warmth of human flesh.

Changing shows so I can have him for just another spiteful moment longer in this temporary existence—could that be like changing my mind?

⏮ Describe something that happened five years ago.

I remember the ride on the Mind Bender more than I remember my best friend.

I can’t pinpoint the shade of her hair, the airiness of her giggle, or even who out of my classmates had been encouraging her to cut them in line so we could get on the mechanical beast first, much to my dismay.

The panic, however, is seared into my bones from when we went upside down. I can remember my high-pitched screams, the phantom feeling of my glasses, though I had taken them off before we got into the cart, precariously hanging off my face, ready to fall. I still remember the oxymoronic rough rubberiness of the seats. The cocktail of time and that overriding primary emotion—it leaves the memory with the quality of a dream, because 2019 feels more faraway than other years.

The pandemic itself added an extra layer of disassociation. We speak about times before it as if it were a past life—nothing but a hazy impressionism where memories watercolour to nothing, and saved pictures in our files are mere relics where we know nothing about the people inside them.

And yet, I have been fourteen forever, I feel. I don’t truly think I defied any death on that thing—some small part of a childhood that had always been shedding its skin across the years was left behind.

The Mind Bender was shut down a few years later, deemed too taxing and too dangerous for consistent maintenance. The platform is barred behind yellow fencing, the darkened rollercoaster paused upside down on the looped tracks like a statue tombstone. Galaxyland was renamed Hasbro Land. The space-themed rides were shuffled out for a new corporate childhood for new children of lucrative excitement.

My best friend and I, since settling into university, have often marveled at the idea of hyperthymesia—perfect autobiographical memory, every day remembered precisely down to the finest details. We dreamed of capitalism kind enough to cure our existential dread: a place selling perfectly preserved, tangible memories, which could be stored and then brought out at our pleasure in a way the inefficient, endless void that is the closet of our minds could never imitate. I imagined little golden orbs like in Inside Out.

I’d hear my memories in a French that never dies.

I always believed this hopefulness to be an individual private sadness of mine. But then my best friend sent a distraught morning text once:

“I was remembering you, and I forgot how your voice sounds :(”

She was confused when I replied that her text had made me laugh. It certainly wasn’t funny—but it was endearing. People don’t want to forget me too, despite my moving away for university, not wanting to be associated with Edmonton ever again. Despite the fact that I am slow in repairing the months I go without speaking to my old friends.

I’m worried one day it will be more interesting to me, as a writer, to miss people than to have them readily available to me. Romanticising an inevitable change would be convenient. But I could not prefer convenience over the various shades of human experience, splendid of their kind, cutting to my core.

I could remedy her plight with a voice message or a call—a miniature hyperthymesia, my voice always sounding the same and saying the same things over and over. But for those moments when there are no golden orbs, our minds are such special vehicles. You have no idea what information it will exchange, what distant memory it will dredge up. To have experienced the thing—I’d prefer it over any recreation of feeling, tangible or otherwise. I’d prefer my body grieving.

⏩ ⏭ Describe something you’ve completely forgotten.

My maternal aunt told me over the phone that when I was a baby, I had a “grandmother” head. The first few months of my life, I didn’t have braids. My relatives, including my maternal grandfather, would all get a good laugh photographing me because I had such tiny features, framed by a loud afro like my maternal grandmother’s. They started calling me “Grandma” in French ever since—“Mamie.”

I wouldn’t say I forgot where the nickname came from, but I always assumed they called me that because I was named after my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born. It was strange to figure out I had been carrying a misplaced grief, one I had constructed all on my own, while everyone else the whole time had been addressing me by that nickname with an affectionate joy. My interpretation wasn’t wrong, but for so long, I had given myself a false memory.

One such photograph is my cropped WhatsApp profile picture. I’m sitting in my father’s lap at my maternal grandparents’ kitchen table in their grainy little apartment. My father is unsuccessfully feeding me baby cereal, a pale yellow coat of it smeared across my pouting upper lip, because my beady eyes are distractedly looking right into the camera.

I don’t want to know who is behind it. In my head, I want it to be my grandfather.

Looking at that photograph brought me to the decision to return to France for the millionth time and spend my twentieth birthday there.

I want to sit at that table as the woman he only had memories of as a baby,

then a young girl.

I want to eat a bowl of solid cereal,

staring into nothing materialising itself.

And across from me, he’s there, in all the likeness I remember. One eye peering into the camera’s viewfinder at me like he is looking into the future. It’s possible.

“Je t’aime,” he rumbles, and it is the thunder of a necessary storm. “Je suis encore là.”

◀◀⏩⏮⏭⏯

(1): French for “memories”

Roukia Ali (Kia, she/her) is an award-winning Canadian-Comorian writer based in Toronto. She is currently pursuing her Honours Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. When not writing she can be found trying different teas, wishing on stars, and looking up plane tickets to France. Interact with her on Instagram @roukiaa9140