We talked till dawn that night, and I was exhausted and exhilarated by the time I returned to my thin foam mattress. Sometimes I call this evening “the night Anna and I fell in love,” and sometimes I call it “the first night of our lives together,” but I can’t call it “the night we chain-smoked and ate cheese pizza in Mark’s dorm room,” because that happened pretty often.
In the later years of college, she and I would drink wine on friends’ porches and sit together at picnic tables messy with tortilla chips and margarita spills. Anna knew how to knock back drinks by then. But in the first year we spent together, our adventures were limited to a 14-story dorm. We made each other mix tapes. We wrote each other handwritten letters and dropped them in the post office slot, even though we lived 150 feet apart, because we both understood the rush of getting mail. And through our long and loping conversations, I began to discover Anna had an industrial-grade memory. She could recall the most mundane details of my past. The make and model of Miles’s car. The names of my cousins. It goosed me each time, like she’d been reading my journal.
Back in high school, an impeccable memory had been my superpower. I had archives of useless knowledge: the number of singles released from Thriller (seven), the actor who played the villain in The Karate Kid (Billy Zabka). Friends used to rely on me to fill in the backstory about our shared past. This was before the Internet, when the very act of remembering could make me feel like a whiz kid bound for a Jeopardy! championship. What was the name of our freshman-year health teacher again? Where was that concert we went to in ninth grade?
And I would think, “How can people forget their own lives?”
But college introduced me to people like Anna, whose memories surpassed my own. And I was dazzled by this, but I was also a bit intimidated, like a star high school athlete who’s joined the pros.
“How can you remember that?” I would ask her, dumbstruck.
And she would arch her left eyebrow, her favorite pose of feminine mystery, and let the question dangle.
I tried to match her. I squirreled away biographical driftwood to lob into our conversations for a future surprise. Bam! Bet you didn’t think I knew the name of your old coworker at the IHOP. Boom! Didn’t realize I knew who sat beside you in philosophy, did you? My shelves were filled with books I could not finish and textbooks I never cracked. But I was always cramming for the test about Anna’s past. I paid lavish attention to every word she spoke. Until then, it had not occurred to me what an act of love this was: to remember another person’s life.
I STARTED SPENDING more time with Miles in our spring semester. We were trying to be “friends,” which is another way of saying I wanted to get back together, and he wanted to sleep with me. It was working out pretty well.
I ditched the dining hall for evenings in his dorm watching old Star Trek episodes with the guys from down the hall. I was bored by Star Trek, but I liked being the only girl surrounded by that boy stink. They passed around a bong, letting their minds expand, while I settled in a beanbag and drank my Carlo Rossi wine (one jug for $5.99).
Miles loved pot. It fixed him, the way booze fixed me. I smoked with him twice, and both times I forgot simple words. Like “chair” and “desk.” Pot did the opposite of what I wanted from an illicit substance. It shut me down, turned me paranoid. I’d also read pot affected your long-term memory, and I worried what might happen to Miles if he continued to use. Back in high school, he was quick-witted, sharp, but now his voice could acquire such a thick syrup. Heeeeey, duuuuude.
I was scared of drugs. I never told Miles this, because I wanted to be close again, but I thought drugs were dirty and wrong and destructive. People often complain the “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign of the ’80s was ineffective, but it worked on one person. I was afraid to touch any of that shit. A line of cocaine made you drop dead. Heroin was a gun in your mouth. As I sat there watching Miles load a pipe or tap out a flaky trail along a piece of thin and crinkly rolling paper, all I could think was: Why can’t you drink like normal people?
But I kept hanging around him. I loved him—at least, I kept saying I did. And I knew if I stayed in his orbit long enough, his better judgment would drift out the window with his pot smoke and there was a good chance we’d end up in his bottom bunk once more.
“What does this mean?” I asked one morning, head on his chest.