The Reader Dissolves | Entry #25
On the Art of Forgetting
“Names vanish, but the body remembers.” — Marguerite Duras
“Desire is the kind of hunger that is only fed by absence.” — Octavio Paz
"Even love, when it is not possession, devours.” — Clarice Lispector
Dear Diary,
Night at King Harbor. The boats were moored in rows like endless commas. The air smelled of salt and diesel and something sweetly rank—Camembert with missionary zeal. Sally had brought crackers. V. uncorked the wine. Sea lions barked in intervals, like hecklers at an open mic.
I opened my Substack dashboard. White string lights flickered along the boom, making the names ripple across the screen. I scrolled slow, deliberate.
Nothing.
No name that caught. No name that held.
“That one?” Sally pointed with a cracker.
“No,” I said. “That’s a botanist from Ontario.”
“What about—”
“No. Wrong time zone.”
“This one?”
“No, that’s the beekeeper from the farmer’s market.”
I scrolled on. Imagined him there, tucked under a pseudonym, blending into the list until he could be anyone—until he was everyone. A trick of the light. A name I must have known once, but now couldn’t pull out from the chorus.
Sally leaned back, clinical. “R.D.D. Reader Dissociative Disorder. Happens when you fixate on one reader so long you forget the rest exist. Severe cases: you start writing to ghosts.”
“Is it fatal?” I asked.
“Only to your vanity,” she said, snapping the cracker clean in two.
I turned on her, sudden. “This is your fault. You threw his name into the water the last time we were on this boat!”
“Your fault,” Sally shot back. “I was clear: page or plunge. You chose page.”
“I meant plunge.”
“Darling, then you should have written it like you meant it. But if you ask me—”
“I’m not asking you.”
“It doesn’t matter. You made the right choice.”
V. stirred then, eyes on the mast lights. “I was clear too, querida. Touch, smell, taste, hear. If you want permanence, you must involve the senses. Otherwise the body forgets. The cortex files it under ephemera.”
“I hate to say it,” I muttered, “but V. is right. In service of the story?”
V.’s mouth curved, flattered. “Indeed. In service of the story.”
Sally flicked her crumbs into the sea. “Otherwise—poof! Gone with the wind.”
“Indeed again,” V. said. “Or better yet, The Unbearable Lightness of Fleeing.”
I rubbed at my chest. “But I can’t remember. His name. It’s gone.”
“Exercises,” Sally announced, already tying her scarf across my eyes. “Alphabet. Backwards. Go.”
“Z, Y, X…” My tongue tripped. The sea lions guffawed. I skipped R, S—forgot T and O. Arrived at C, then started over. The letters scattered like gulls—wild, white, uncatchable. Gone. I started over, but it was hopeless. Blank. Nothing. Gone, dear Diary. Vanished.
I felt it in my chest: a murmur, a whistle where the name might have been lodged. Now just a hole—small enough to pass unnoticed in an ultrasound, big enough to cause havoc.
I placed my palm over my heart. “Here,” I told Sally. “That’s where I feel it most.”
“Never mind the heart, dear. Stop feeling and think. Think of the project. Think of your writing. Try again.” She pressed. I stumbled further, the thread unraveling in my hands.
She yanked off the scarf. “Fine. Balance test.” She set her empty wine glass upside down on the back of my hand. “Don’t drop it while you recall him. Works on hiccups. Should work on men.”
I froze. The glass wobbled, tipped, shattered on the deck.
“Hopeless,” Sally declared, brushing Camembert from her lap.
V. finally spoke. “Music.”
“What kind?”
“Something jangly. Male voice pitched too high, straining. Lyrics swollen with vanity. A chorus designed to hammer the hippocampus until it yields. Perfect for recall.”
Sally soured her lips, but tapped her phone. A nasal voice strained upward, always about to break.
“Annoying,” I said.
“Excellent,” V. replied. “Annoyance is mnemonic. Pain chisels memory.”
But the music didn’t help. I tried rereading one of my own entries aloud, summoning the syllables:
“The soft press of the lips, then parting. Mid-syllable tension. The tongue brushing something deliberate. Then, as if by accident, the flick outward—the syllable that exits quietly. A lilt. A kingdom by the sea.”
Absolutely nothing. Not absence. Worse—emptiness. A silence so sharp I could hear it breathe. My heart stuttered.
That’s when V. tilted her head, voice sharp as a scalpel. “No hay otra, querida. The body doesn’t parse by parts. It requires hard evidence—otherwise it starves on fragments.”
“I can’t,” I whispered. “The Reader doesn’t want to be touched, I think. Not even a little. Harmless, really. A brush of my arm against his sleeve on the way to coffee. That’s all. The kind of contact so accidental it barely qualifies as contact. Static on fabric. A voice. Nothing more.
I swallowed. “Not a kiss. Not collapse. Only proof I’m not writing vapor. That he is not marble. That, for this fleeting durée, we’re drawn sharp against each other’s outline.”
“Darling, of course he wants it. He only wants to want it in theory—where sleeves don’t brush and no one’s breath gets caught. But you’ve already gone further than that. Every word you wrote slid over his skin, loosened his belt buckle, bit his lips. The only part of him you haven’t touched, dear, is his Achilles’ heel.”
“Which is?”
“Reality. Flesh-and-blood presence. A sleeve. A wrist. The tiniest proof of existence. That’s the heel, darling—the one spot no metaphor can shield. Graze it once, and he goes down in a love-struck seizure. A convulsive Oh for Oh, dear Lord. And don’t you see, darling? Even his surrender undresses in grammar.”
V. nodded. “She’s correct. The nervous system does not parse intention. It doesn’t care whether it’s a brush on cotton or a brush in syntax. Touch in the wild—unsimulated—is catastrophic evidence. That’s the heel.”
I laughed, bitter. “Catastrophic evidence. Yes. But I lie, dear Diary. I lie when I say all I want is the brush of his sleeve. If I ever got my hands on the Reader, I wouldn’t stop. Not at sleeves. Not at static. I would devour him. Devour him, dear Diary. Piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the breath between syllables. And even then, I’d save one sliver. Just one. For breakfast. So he’s wise, even thoughtful, to pause, really. Because what would a reader know about actual touch? Readers live on the page. And, well, the page can reach and nibble, even bite, but can it devour? And how exactly can I reach his heel?”*
Sally clapped, delighted. “Carnivorous! At last, a confession. See, darling? You were never asking for sleeves. You were just a tad famished after all that writing. And famished women don’t nibble. They lap it up, hand to mouth. And as far as his heel, you’ll have to arm yourself with a bow and arrow. Then call on Apollo.”
V., taking another swig from the bottle: “Biologically apt. Appetite metabolizes. Nothing’s more honest than hunger. And nothing more precise than Apollo’s aim. Even the god of plague understood: the body is undone by what pierces it.”
I bowed my head. “And yet… I’ll go on pretending it’s only sleeves. Only a brush. Because that’s what keeps him reading. And once he knows the truth—once he feels teeth instead of fabric—he’ll vanish.”
The thought hollowed me. I’d learn what it meant to live with the hole: appetite—neither hunger nor love, perhaps both, or somewhere in between. It struck against the ribcage, violent, insistent, as though it meant to splinter bone and break through. A force without a name, demanding one. I turned to the exercises, as though sound might brace the body against it, hold it intact.
The exercises failed. The music swelled. My mouth shaped itself around the memory, but instead of a name, what arrived was emptiness. Not absence—emptiness. A space so sharp I could almost hear it breathing. A murmur.
And then, without warning, I understood, dear Diary: the trial had worked.
Not recall.
Release.
And I remembered only the forgetting.
Only the beginning:
¹ Disclaimer: This is, ostensibly, fiction. S. will not arrive unannounced with a bow, and she has no declared plans to devour the Reader—or any reader. Unless, of course, the devouring has already happened. Or unless clear permission is given, duly noted and signed in triplicate. In which case, dear Reader, you should already know.
“Heart of Glass, because, well—divine. And don’t argue, darling, I pick the soundtrack.” —Sally
From S.: “Nieblas del riachuelo”