GoKawiilThe pharmacist would not shut up about side effects. “Some mild weeping,” he’d said. “A little spatial disorientation in 1% of users. A sense of longing, obviously.”
“That’s the point,” she’d replied. “I want the longing.”
Now she’s speeding down a European highway, gulping the scent of wet hay through a cracked window, trying to drink in the rolling hills. Sound of Music, cue the overture. She can’t hear any birds over the wheeze of her ancient car, so she imagines them.
When she’d pressed the pharmacist for details, he’d explained that the aerosol didn’t create memories so much as unstick them. “It massages the hippocampus into opening its archive,” he’d said. She pictured hers swelling awake, the spray sinking into its folds like rain into dry moss. “People underestimate how much the brain keeps,” he added.
He was right. One spritz and memories she had thought permanently dissolved floated back up: feeding ducks in the park; her mother’s potatoes sizzling on a Sunday afternoon; the hush of early morning in her childhood home. That home is beige now, renovated beyond recognition by a young couple who bulldozed her favourite lilac bush without noticing her parked across the street. Her parents are gone. Her only cousin sends her novelty socks every Christmas, proof of life but not connection.
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So, when the memory of an impossibly green field bloomed in her mind, it felt like a gift. She’d never been to rural Austria, or at least she didn’t remember going. But memories slip as you age, and it would be just like her father, she thought, to whisk her off to some hidden patch of beauty she was too young to appreciate. And once she looked, the place was shockingly easy to find on a map. So she packed a bag, told no one and drove.
Traffic snarls around her, but what else is new? She’s never got anything in life without a biblical trial first. Probably this many cars on a Sunday is normal for Europe. Is it Sunday? She’s lost track. The meadow, just a few miles ahead, keeps nudging at her, like a child asking to be carried. She weaves through the jam, murmuring “sorry, sorry”, as though she’s personally responsible for all of it. She has that headache she always gets when her face has been set in a frown too long.
Surely rural Austria is in high demand; the Alps are celebrity mountains, after all. Maybe there’s a food festival. That would explain the traffic jams, the roadblocks, the countless people. No matter, the Mist has made everything feel like destiny. Even the potholes seem to wink at her: Yes, queen, reclaim that past.
She sprays another hit. Probably not recommended while driving, but she’s far beyond rational guidelines. She’s become devout, sniffing the stuff up between Tic Tacs and swigs of energy drink. The memories arrive soft and angelic: her mother’s fingers in her hair, her father’s voice humming just shy of intelligible.
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