The Pressure of Forgetting by Leslie Cairns

Find me where the train tracks go backward. Where the dandelion yellows mix with gravel.

I always sing a song to my husky, because my OCD tells me so. I don’t fold linens, I don’t keep clean: those are movie-style deliriums of what it is to feel, feel, feel: count to three. Feel, feel, feel–

I blink. My mind lets me go from threes: past, present, future.

I rub her plushie ears – my puppy who is now a dog– even though she’s alive, but her ears feel like the way the earth should be. Soft, too soft, vulnerable & listening.

My grandma is sitting somewhere in a hospital room, all alone. Does she get upset when the sheets are rumpled? When I was younger, I used to make the bed after I stayed over, to be nice. She’d come in, smile, and said she had to redo it right. She just had a certain way it had to be: all folded, a penny could bounce off it, she said. Now, she cannot remember her name is Judy. She cannot remember the recipes for thousands of cookies she made, for all the grandkids coming and going–

Back then, I’d beg for her to let us eat the batter, and she’d let us. She’d say: We have to taste the first one, to see if they’re ready. And even as a kid, with pigtails rising like the blades in a ceiling fan, I knew she was lying to me. She just let me because she could, and she wanted us to feel sweetness, like putty, folding in our hands.

And I sing this same song every day to my husky: all Alaskan fur and cold jogs that feel like nothing–our wintery air catching kisses as they escape our lungs–but tonight I forget the lyrics. The ones I sing every day to her, like a rhythm, a way to contain the world from all its sadness.

Instead, I have to hum a few notes, and my husky doesn’t mind. Then, I join in with an echo, hoping I got the words right.  No one is there to fact-check me, to lullaby me back with words that are familiar. I’m wondering if I will follow in footsteps gone backward.

Remember the way you said we would ruin the cookies if we turned on the oven light for too long? Opening affected the temperature. Looking inward too much at the heat, the pressure. I’m sitting cross-legged, wondering about ifs. If I’ll someday forget that dandelions turn yellow when you put them under your chin–on a dare–or near your belly.

Find me sideways near the place where people are coming or going. Under the bridge, or the highway speckled with insomnia cities. Wondering where I am, and where she is, if she longs to– 

If she remembers the way I’d add sweetness into the bowl, and stir it in rigorously, when I thought nobody was looking. Wondering if she saw me, wondering if–

If lineage can cause the forgetting of our names.

Artist’s Statement

I enjoy writing about prose poems and psychological themes. My goal here was to write a piece about my grandmother's dementia, which is vastly personal, while also connecting with animals and concrete imagery. Mental health also appears in many of my pieces, as well as a hybrid structure.

Leslie Cairns holds an MA degree in English Rhetoric. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She loves her two dogs, especially the dramatics of her husky. She has upcoming flash, short stories, and poetry in various magazines, including Cerasus Magazine, Pink Plastic House, Bright Flash Literary Review, Londemere Lit, and others.