Heather Buyce-Vasquez
Lyllian, May 2017, Seattle
It is official. Lyllian has finally been prescribed anti-anxiety meds. The irrational waves of excited chatter and spontaneous cleaning and organizing and organizing and cleaning have finally gnawed away at her cynical yet upbeat exterior. The constant potty mouth motherfucker at every passing German made car and impatient me me me when you are starting to sound like your teenager and she is starting to sound like the adult. The terrible waves of tear welling at every ASPCA and Life Insurance commercial. The distracted cooking when the water boiling for pasta evaporates because you saw a cheerio on the floor under the table and once on your knees found yourself scrubbing the chair legs and then organizing the piles of mail into stuff to ‘keep out and do something with’ versus stuff to ‘put away in the file cabinet’ versus stuff to ‘throw out’ versus stuff to ‘ask Michael about’.
Lyllian begins the long process of trying this and that. Riding the side effect roller coaster to see which cons outweigh the other cons. It all came to a head the night she found the locket. The constant random visions and memories. Blacking out in her office and realizing 37 minutes have passed and you haven’t blinked. The feeling of being there before and seeing it before and hearing it before and doing it before until you begin to wonder if you are in someone else’s present.
The locket. She remembers it. Remembers finding it. In her brother Jim’s room on his dresser. She’d taken it then and hid it under her pillow. In the pillowcase of course so that even when her mother lifted up her pillow to check for books after hours and shoo the cat out – a fat gray tabby named Garp – the locket clung to the pillow-case and remained a small hard little shape against her cupped hand.
And then the trail goes cold. She’d lost track of the locket and soon it receded from her memory completely. She remembers the silvery image of the girl and the ghostly image of a young man. The clasp was slightly bent and the back scuffed. This much she recalls. Then nothing.
Then when she was 10 years-old she had the oddest dream. She ‘d just gotten home from her friend Jessica’s house tossing her Schwinn carelessly on the front lawn and shedding her jean jacket as she crossed the foyer into the kitchen to sneak a pop-tart. Jogging lightly up to her room she lay down on her Care Bear bedspread and nibbling on the pop tart she slipped through the latest Bop magazine she’d borrowed from Jessica. She must have fallen asleep though the memory seemed so smudged now. A ride wearing a puffy black coat and matching hat. The drive in the long car the silhouette of the man in the front seat eyes flickering in the rearview every so often. The barn. The stench. The woman and the candles. The pain in her head.
Now she remembers the blackouts. They started after that. Long minutes when she was simply somewhere else. It was during one of these times she loses the locket.