Trembling With Fear 7-21-24

Posterity, by Sammi Leigh Melville 

I remember up until the car ride.

We piled our suitcases and backpacks into the trunk of the Honda. Phil locked his front door, and the two of us climbed in and began to drive. Summer break, our fourth road trip together. We weren’t stopping until we got to San Diego.

I remember struggling with the seat belt, getting it stuck after too quick of a movement, and feeling the lack of give, as if the seatbelt thought I was catapulting forward and was trying to protect me from some impending accident. I felt the tightness on my chest. I laughed, leaned back, and adjusted, clicking the belt into place. I remember Phil glancing over, a sardonic look on his face, asking if I was all right. I remember shoving him.

I remember stopping at the gas station, buying Cheetos and Mountain Dew, while Phil bought cheap coffee and breath mints, because “you gotta have balance in your life, you know?”

Why don’t I remember past that?

It hurts here. I can’t move; my entire body feels like a sliver, pinned down or pressed sideways, I don’t even know. Flat, and paperlike. I try to breathe, but I don’t know if I can. It’s like I released my final breath, and never sucked back in, and my lungs are aching for oxygen but I just… can’t. Some invisible barrier presses against my chest, like a prison of air when all I need is that very thing. Why can’t I breathe? How am I still alive?

I am smiling. I hurt so much, and I can’t move, but I am smiling, oh god, why am I smiling? And my arm is pressed against someone’s body, but I can’t move my head to see. I swivel my eyes and try to focus, see Phil. He looks strange. Not out-of-a-horror-movie strange, but… flat. Like me.

I am smiling and my lungs are crying and my limbs don’t work and I am still alive. Where am I?

Focus. Look out at the world around you. Take in your surroundings. If you can’t remember how you got here, then you can still try to find out where you are now. Get a grip.

I am in a room.

The room is cluttered. Posters and photos line the walls. A lone string of lights encircles the ceiling, a sloppy attempt at ambience. I recognize this place: it’s my bedroom. Except I’ve never seen it from this angle before. I am looking out over my desk, but not the way I normally look out over my desk. My desk faces the wall. I am facing my room.

I try to look down. It’s easy—there seems to be nothing blocking my view. No lap, no dangling feet. I don’t see my body. I see the desktop, post-its scattered and Bic pens piled in the corner, an ironic Lisa Frank folder with scuffed corners buried under the mess. Chaos abides. If this were less of an imperative moment, I would chide myself for not picking up.

Where is my body? No one should be able to look down and at least not see their own nose.

I look back over at Phil. His curly hair is pressed flat against his head, still somehow curly, still somehow… I don’t know. My lungs are burning, and my brain is like mush, and I don’t understand what I’m seeing. Phil is also smiling, and his arm is in view, reached forward, except not reached forward. It is the appearance of reached forward.

That is the moment in which I understand. That’s not Phil. That is a photograph of Phil. And I am in it.

I remember now. I remember getting back into the car at the gas station, grinning at Phil and pulling out my cell phone. “Selfie,” I said. Phil groaned, and I elbowed him gently. “For posterity,” I said. I snapped the photo, and that is where the memory stops.

My mind flashes back to a history class in the eighth grade, in which Mrs. Dorsund had paced the front of the class, staring at us dramatically like she always did while she told us random stories from history. She thought that the more dramatic she was in her tellings, the more we would remember the stories. “Many Native Americans refused to allow their pictures to be taken,” she’d said, glancing around for a reaction. “They thought that photographs were a prison for the soul. That the layers of celluloid and silver halide would trap the soul inside. By that theory, every single photograph ever taken would steal a sliver of your soul, bit by bit, photo by photo, until there was nothing left.” Her eyes glittered. “They believed this was a form of magic, just as many foreign things were often viewed. That which you do not understand becomes wicked, to be held at arm’s length. While many Native Americans have now come to appreciate the passing down of ancestral memories that photographs provide, there are still those who refuse their photograph even today.”

“Maybe they just don’t want to be made into a spectacle,” Phil had called out, leaning back in his seat and tapping his pencil on the desk.

Mrs. Dorsund had smiled, her pacing paused for a moment. “That, too.”

Pinned against my bedroom wall, I realize there was one detail Mrs. Dorsund neglected to postulate. She had said the Native Americans were concerned about losing pieces of their soul, bit by bit, until there was nothing left of them. But she never said anything about being the piece of soul, stuck for an eternity on the wall of your own bedroom.

I look around. Photos of me throughout the years dot the walls, many taken by my own hands. Little bits of soul, imprisoned, unable to shut their eyes and say goodbye to this misery. All smiling. All squeezed flat, pinned for posterity.