Forgotten Things

Laura Lee

1. Pair of Slippers

Forgetting starts small is what we, your grandchildren, whisper just low enough to not be heard. It wouldn’t be a problem, except you never told anyone where you keep the spares. My aunt, your daughter, drove to Costco after work to buy a new set, only to find the originals placed carefully on the spinning plate in the microwave when she returned. Now you have two pairs of pink slippers, one faded to a dirty beige, and one fresh and still creased from the packaging.

It starts small. Small like misplaced slippers, mismarked birthdays in the calendar by the phone, leftovers that have been in the refrigerator for a little too long. Small like pinhole stars in the night sky casting a blissful, soft glow over everything. You aren’t worried about the slippers, and you cannot hear what we are discussing.

2. Recipe for Fried Shrimp

We’ll have to eat something else for New Year's. I’ll miss snatching shrimp off a paper plate at the low table with my cousins, waves of laughter echoing from the kitchen where the adults were eating. The house was full of people, your children and their children. You would sometimes wander into the room where the grandchildren were to listen to our American chatter mingling with the crunch of little mouths eating—the sound of prosperity.

It starts small. But sometimes it starts like a rolling boil, until the sound of popping oil is filling the kitchen, bubbles giggling and releasing into the air, leaving behind only the smell of fried shrimp and the effervescent sound of laughter in the next room.

3. Sewing Box

It was older than my mother, the youngest of her four sisters, the only one born in America. When she was little, she would sometimes rummage through it, playing with the bobbins and chalk, balancing a metal thimble on the end of her baby thumb. The same thimble you would pluck off in sweaty relief after hours bent over in that factory room with one overworked AC unit, sewing the same men’s jean pocket over and over. Once, she asked you about the spot on your hand you had scraped raw from rubbing against the denim. You told her it was from cooking, not wanting her to picture her mother in that room, the incessant rattling of dozens of sewing machines and the dozens of immigrant women bent over them.

It starts small. But sometimes it starts like a rhythm. Like the repetitive thrumming of sewing machines, the hypnotizing motion of a running stitch. It became something you learned to do in your sleep, white lies peppering over memories like marking chalk dust on a sewing factory floor. Maybe it starts small. Or maybe it starts like a droning hum that grows until it drowns out the sound of sewing machines and your aching shoulders, long after you quit that job, until you can no longer remember where you put that damn sewing box.

4. Smell of Hot Metal

Some things you are glad to lose. Sometimes forgetting does not start small. Sometimes it starts with a loud sound and a casualty. The handsome ROK soldier with the laughing eyes wanted to show you and your sister the shiny levers and switches in the engine room before the ship pulled away from the burning shores of your home. 

The wild bullet cut through the thin metal walls of the boat like a seabird piercing water to seize a fish. Your sister screamed, and for one horrible moment, you weren’t sure who was shot. The echo of the bullet rang in that metal box in the ocean, reverberating off the aluminum siding of the boat, off the bone siding of your skull, then fell away to muffled silence. And suddenly, the only evidence that it ever came is your stifled hearing and the blooming red stain on the boy on the ground beside you. And the smell of hot metal where there was a wall and then there wasn’t. Where there was a boy and now there isn’t. On a boat, taking you from the place that was your home, and now isn’t.

Sometimes forgetting does not start small. Sometimes it starts with a hole in the siding that smolders at the edges and ends with the stench of something burned out of existence, a smell you never speak about, that exits your memory as gently and cleanly as a bullet leaving a body. 

5. Sound of Running Water By Your House in the Village

You are barely big enough to climb over the large, flat stones lining the creek bed. Your Appa has to lift you by the arms to dip your toes into the cold water. The push of the current against your feet reminds you of the wind that ripples through the pine trees and carries the velvety scent of wet grass. Miriam, look over there. Fireflies glint leisurely by the back wall of the house, where your baby sister is sitting with Umma among the rushes, chubby fists gleefully opening and closing with rapture. Decades later, when your first daughter turns two, she reaches for the ceiling fan in just the same way, and you have to blink a few times to make sure it is really her and not your sister. 

Rain starts to fall. Barely at first, and then all at once. You squeal as you and Appa dart inside, Umma grabbing your giggling sister as she ducks into the house. Inside, you stretch out on the warm ondol floor. Beyond the walls of the house, the government says you cannot speak Korean. Beyond the walls of the house, you are called a different name and speak a different language. But on this night, fireflies Appa caught under a jar are flitting around on the low table and the sound of rain is distant and silky. On this night, the walls of the house are miles thick and you fall asleep right there on the floor.

So it starts small. Or maybe it starts like a rolling boil. Or a droning hum. Or a hole in the siding that smolders. But sometimes it comes gentle like the push of the current against your feet and gathers momentum as it tumbles over rocks and rounds corners. You want to keep this night. But a river does not choose. A river starts and ends. It cannot flow back, to the creek in the field, back to the night at the house in the village. And so, the water in the creek becomes river, then the river becomes ocean. Maybe it starts small, then ends with an emptying into a boundless sea.

Laura Lee is a fourth year undergraduate at Cornell University majoring in biology and minoring in English. She lives in sunny Georgia when she isn't in New York, shivering.