Santalore
Don’t let me forget
Article by Alexis Cornachio, art by Alex Wollinka
I’ve held a couple of meek promises in my life. Not one stands out. I’ve held them loose in my fingers but tight to my chest. My arms have rarely let up. They’re strong, but sometimes promises will fall through the gaps between my fingers. They must’ve been too meek to grip onto.
I’ve never asked someone to promise me anything before.
That’s not true.
Maybe my mom. I asked her to promise me Santa was real – that the half-eaten cookies by the fireside on Christmas morning were the doing of an old bearded man hailing from the North Pole, not my dad’s. I probably asked my dad to promise me that the crushed candy cane scattered across our front steps was really from Santa’s reindeer, not from his own grayed and beaten down running sneakers. Big green pleading eyes told my mom to lie straight to her five-year-old daughter’s face. Promise me Santa is real, you wouldn’t lie to me, right mom?
Santalore. The first betrayal.
Sometimes you have to lie a little to protect your first daughter’s innocence. The guilt still eats at her. She brings it up during winter break, on a car ride out east. The orange sun fades into an artificial earth through my rearview mirror. Objects are closer than they appear. I think the sun is far, far away.
I was taught that promises were sacred. That if you promised something, you couldn’t break it. So, I rarely promise. Unless I mean it.
We’re sitting around our wooden family table from the old house, except now in the gray, hardly furnished rental apartment my mom hates. The table holds our family dinner conversations like one big promise. Close to its wooden heart, it holds belly laughter and my little brother’s recitings of the ABC's. It stores small-town folklore and gossip, and it secretly swells with cruel words we should have never said, screaming matches, and apology tears. Grease stains are remnants of Sunday night take out. Splintered edges round the old rectangular table. It is weathered but could never break. This big promise is sacred.
I get really uncomfortable when asked to hold a promise.
Why?
I’ll mess up. I’ll forget. I get easily distracted by fossil fuel-eating planes that can take me to a place that is far, far away, filled with people I don’t know and versions of selves I could be. These ideas consume my mind. I don’t have time to hold meek promises. Just let me live outside of the constraints of your promises. If it’s sacred, it can’t be touched. I’m not even religious. I’ve only ever believed in Santa. I can’t hold onto it. I shouldn’t.
At some point I decided it was okay to live under the constraints of my own promises -- the ones made by me, to me. Self-interested.
Are promises to myself most sacred?
I’ll lose my grip and let you fall somewhere in between my fingers if you ask me to live under the constraints of yours. I’ll try my hardest, but I can’t promise. Nothing’s guaranteed, right? I’ll mess up. I just want to get closer to the sun. What if your promises take me to the burning edge of a rocky bluff and when I fall off, all I want to do is swim all the way to the sun? But my arms are tired and somehow, they let up.
I promise myself I won’t forget freckles along the ridge of her nose and wet supple cheeks. Those mornings where all I see is deep fog hanging over the ocean. This makes it harder to see, easier to breathe (you). But then I even forget the shitty lyrics written in my Notes app, which is all I left you with.
Other things I promise myself to never forget:
Quiet sobs coming from a hotel bathroom. Super meek. Definitely meek. Lost words that got stuck in the back of my throat.
I forget the code to the new apartment every time I go back. I forgot to put the lockout key under the mat. The one time I forgot to turn the stove off, my roommates came home to a wretched smell and toxified air. Is it because I’m consumed in the memories – in a dream of what could be? What would someone else’s memories look like?
Promise me you won’t forget what it felt like to run for the first time. Promise you won't ever stop running. Until your legs give. Because it makes it harder to breathe, easier to see you. Unlike foggy mornings by the sea.