Homelessness of the heart
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Illustration: Jacey
The 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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