Kristina Garvin
You and I have the same memories. We were born the same year. What binds us: the lasso arms of Halley’s comet, its choreographed doubling-back to happen only after we’re dead. We’ve been practicing nostalgia since before we could drive. What we remember, together: Baby Jessica in the well. Baby Jessica out of the well. How easy it was warp to the eighth level of Super Mario Bros., and impossible to save the princess. How Ceaușescu’s eyes, wide and unsurprised, stared at us from the newspaper’s front page, ruining Christmas, if Christmas had been a thing to ruin. How Kurt Loder on MTV always seemed so uncomfortably plain. How he seemed less so one day, with the urgent bulletin that Kurt Cobain had shot himself. How MTV ended this bulletin by going straight to video: Guns N’ Roses’ version of “Since I Don’t Have You.” That we both remember this detail strikes us as miraculous, absurd. Why did it take so long for our paths to cross? I spent my whole life looking for you. How do two such hoarders survive the dust-up of skeletal youth and not find each other until the fleshy otherworld of middle age? We’re too old for children, so our apartment is a storehouse of things we’d hoped to show future offspring. Newspaper clippings, diaries, trinkets. Snow globe containing the Twin Towers—all this kitsch serving as proof that we saw what we saw because proof was hard to come by. No cloud software to whisk away every step of your life. Just detritus: ticket stubs from concerts, zines swiped from bathroom radiators, mixtapes ruined by the deejay’s nattering over Love Spreads. Piece of slate mistaken for an arrowhead. Polaroid picture of a grade school friend’s underwear-clad butt. Clothes I wore, once, imagining that a daughter would covet checkered bellbottoms, loving what no one else could.
But there will be no children. So we trade stories in the dark and wonder what we would tell a nonexistent daughter curled between us, three ferrets burrowed deep. The world used to be verifiable. Teleological. Truth you could touch. We would say things like progress animated history. Most things got better, not worse. Or maybe: things used to be ordinary. Exhibit A: The shuttle launch. Not Challenger—everyone remembers Challenger—but Discovery, first launch after the disaster. Teachers wheeled TVs into classrooms and forced everyone to watch, even if we didn’t want to watch. We remembered what happened last time: spaceship exploding, astronauts falling, ocean severing them from us forever. We hadn’t healed. But back then no one healed—to adults disaster was backdrop: assassinations on TV, footage of My Lai. Saigon execution with the man captured in either forever death or forever life (did it matter); naked girl running from a cloud like a mouth, her flesh alight, someone’s daughter (not ours, not ever), no one caring to blur her otherworldly face—the ransom she paid so that history’s curators could know what it is to know, preserve, and then tuck away.
So on that day in 1988 we sat before the TV and waited for Discovery to launch, expecting calamity, again—fire and zig-zag smoke, intractable ruin—but no. The O-rings held and we got lift-off instead, violent and complete, sealed when the ship curved toward orbit and became something to forget.
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Kristina Garvin lives in Philadelphia. A native of Columbus, Ohio, she works in public health. Her essays and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Eclectica Magazine, Sky Island Journal, The Palisades Review, Novel Slices, Tangled Locks Journal, 34th Parallel, Feminine Collective, PopMatters, and elsewhere.