Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

from here, I told myself. There will be a road that spirals out into paved streets. And I got excited by
how good I was at this game, just like I was good at the childhood board game of Memory, where
twinned pictures hide on the other side of square cards. Yes, the whole scene was exactly as I
remembered it. The crunch of gravel under my boots. The November wind slicing through my coat.
The flickering of the Eiffel Tower on the hour, thousands of lightbulbs going off at once. The gasp of
the crowd. The kisses, the children lifted onto shoulders. It happened then, and it’s happening now. It
happens many times, every day, and so I don’t quite understand why it gave me such a thrill to think: I
was here once. I remember this.
I remember this. Why is a tug into the past so satisfying? Wise men tell us to live in the present. Be
here now. Stand toe-to-toe with each moment as it arrives. And yet, I love to be pulled into the
corridors of my past. That home where I once lived. That street I used to walk alone. Writers build
monuments to our former selves, our former lives, because we’re always hoping to return to the past
and master it somehow, find the missing puzzle piece that helps everything make sense.
I woke early the next morning to speak to Guillaume, the concierge of long standing. “There was a
guy who used to work the night shift,” I said.
Guillaume listened as I explained in broad strokes, leaving out nearly all details. He shoved his
glasses up the bridge of his nose a few times. “Night guys, we don’t know them much,” he said.
“People come in and out of here all the time.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thanks so much,” and I left before he could see that I was starting to cry.
Why was I crying? Why did I feel foolish at that moment? Maybe because I knew the unedited
story of how that man came into my life, and I hurt for what brought about our intersection. Perhaps
the trip felt futile. I had come all this way to track down someone who could not be found. Or perhaps
there was tender sense memory in the spot where I was standing. I could remember standing at the
same desk seven years before. How leveled I was.
I left the hotel, and climbed into a taxi that took me to an airport that carried me across an ocean
and all the way home. I did not have the answers, but I had the satisfaction of having looked, which is
sometimes the thing you need to move on.
IT’S ABOUT 15 minutes till 8 pm, and I’m sitting on a bench near the location of a dime store where I
used to steal lipstick when I was 12. I would slip the glossy black tubes in my pocket, because I had
discovered I could, and because I wanted more than what I had been given. The dime store is long
gone, replaced by a gourmet burger bar, where the only stealing being done is by the owners: $12 for
a burger with truffle aioli.
Across the street is an unmarked door leading into a room where people who are not drinking
gather and try to be better. I’m meeting a younger woman who reached out to me one night, over
email, after finding a few of my stories online.
“I’m sorry you have to meet me like this,” she says. She apologizes for a lot of things. How
frazzled she is. How sad and confused. She apologizes when she cries, and she apologizes that I have
to spend time with her, and I point out I am choosing to spend time with her.
She doesn’t believe me, and I don’t blame her. I never believed it when people said stuff like that
to me. Yeah, whatever, I would think. Why would you want to spend time with a mess like me?
AA reminds you how much of our stories are the same. This is also what literature, and science,