Mnemosyne’s Typewriter
This story was first published in the Manila Times’ Sunday Times literary section.
So there she was, at the old typewriter that she’d painstakingly learned to repair. The battered old Marathon with the grayish-white laminate peeling off one metal flank was a trooper, taking the weight of her words, the impact of her impatient fingers, with nothing more than its stoic clackety-clacks. Into this keyboard went all the hard facts of life that would break lesser, younger machines. Into this keyboard, and through it, went her words onto the crisp sheets of paper where her fears could be made smaller, more rational, less the bogeymen they were when they wandered about in her disorganized head.
She wrote to remember things that were slowly being taken from her brain — and she began with her fears because that is where her writing would end. There was a symmetry to it. When the sun shone, she wrote of her beloved, how the curve of his cheek fit the palm of her hand. How his gaze took the place of her morning coffee just fine. How his voice resonated through her chest the same way it resonated in the air surrounding them both.
When it rained, she wrote of her childhood, of the person she was when removed from everyone else. She wrote of all the girl things she indulged in solo, of who she was before life intruded upon the world of her own making.
She wrote until her gnarly fingers could no longer strike the keys with the strength it took to leave her mark on the paper, to assert her existence with memory.
Mnemosyne rose from her desk one last time, having finished her final sentence: “I forget and am lost.”
Perhaps she would remember that she can still read.
