The Last Room

In a world where memories can be shared, asking for access is the easy part.

We’d been doing the small memories for weeks now. The harmless ones, mostly.

She liked the afternoon her grandmother taught her to fold dumplings, so she opened it for me one night on the couch, and instantly I was there inside it, seeing how the flour dusted the counter, and hearing the radio in the next room. I could feel her grandmother’s hands moving over hers, intentionally slowing down just enough so that she could follow along herself. When it closed and my mind came back to our living room, I have to admit I didn’t really understand why my eyes were wet. That was the thing about opening a memory for someone. You weren’t just telling them, you were letting them inside.

She had opened dozens like that for me, including the first time she saw the ocean, and the bad haircut at eleven that she’d cried over for a week, and the shame of needing the school nurse to explain what a period was after a mortifying incident in middle school. She even showed me the morning her father left, though she didn’t share it lightly and she did warn me beforehand. I made sure to be especially careful with that one, since I could tell it was obviously both fragile and volatile, even all these years later.

On my end, I suppose I did only give her the easy ones back: vacations, teaching my first dog how to play fetch, the pride I felt winning State in tennis my senior year, things like that. I do feel that I made a genuine effort by sharing the time I broke my wrist skateboarding and pretended to my friends for almost an hour that it didn’t hurt. But apparently my effort to show vulnerability and comply with her request wasn’t quite enough.

“You always pick the safe ones,” she said. We were in bed at the time. The lamp was off but the glow of city lights still managed to sneak its way in through the blinds in stripes.

“Hey, they’re all real and they all happened,” I said. “That’s the goal of this whole thing, right?”

“That’s not what I mean.” She turned onto her side to face me. “I’ve shown you everything, even my last memory of my dad. You’ve seen me at my worst and yet you still just keep your door shut. It’s like there’s a whole room inside you that I’ve never been in.”

I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I didn’t volunteer to say so.

“I’m not asking for something bad,” she said. “I’m just asking to be let in, that’s all. I thought that’s what we wanted from each other…” Her voice trailed off and I could barely hear the end of her sentence.

“Some things are just…I don’t know. Mine and mine alone, I guess,” I said meekly. “That’s not the same as keeping them from you.”

She was quiet for a while, long enough that I almost thought the conversation was over and she had gone to sleep. But then she said, in a smaller voice, “I’d never pressure you into anything you didn’t want to do. You know that, right? I’d never do that.”

I intentionally waited for a beat before responding.

“I know that.”

And I did know that too.

“It’s just frustrating because if you loved me, I feel like you’d want to. I feel like you wouldn’t have to be talked into doing anything.” She wasn’t crying but her voice sounded like she was close. “I open myself up to you willingly, but even after everything we’ve shared, you try to keep me out. Do you know what that feels like?”

“This has nothing to do with not loving you.”

“So tell me what’s holding you back then, because from where I’m lying over here it feels like you don’t trust me. Or at least you don’t trust me with…you.”

I stared at the stripes of light on the ceiling. I actually did my best to find the words for it and explain how it wasn’t a simple matter of love or trust, and that showing it to her wouldn’t be a gift, but rather me bleeding all over her and calling it love. But every word I found just sounded like it masked an excuse, even to me. Every explanation made me feel more like a smaller man hiding from something.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to,” she eventually said before the silence became awkward. She then rested her hand palm-down on my heart, which was something she only did rarely. “I guess I just want all of you. I hope that’s not wrong to ask for? To want all of someone?”

When she put it that way, I admit, it didn’t seem wrong at all. In fact, it was really quite reasonable in a way. And here I was the one turning it into a fight. I was the one being the problem in the room, with my cold withholding. I also admit there was a part of me that was already exhausted by guarding a door without really knowing why.

“It’s not a big deal,” I heard myself say out loud. I still don’t know if I meant her wanting it or me giving it. Nor am I sure if I was trying to convince her or myself.

“You’re right, it’s not,” she agreed gently. “It’s really not.”

So I opened it.

I’m not going to say here what was in that room, because that’s not really the part that matters. What matters is what it felt like to let her in and feel her move through a place I had never shown to anyone. I kept expecting her to panic, or want to stop, or at the very least just need to pause for a moment…but she never did. So I let her look, and somewhere in there, without anything actually changing, I think I began to understand that something already had.

When it ended she was crying, but the good kind of crying, I suppose. She pulled me into her, thanked me, and said “I love you” into my hair. Then I think she may have also said something like “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Then she held me like I’d given her something precious. In retrospect, I supposed I had.

I returned the hug, just as warm, and said I loved her too. And I meant it, at the time, I’m pretty sure.

But I already wanted it back.

I lay awake after she’d gone soft and slow against my chest. I tried recalling the memory again out of habit, the way you keep checking a pocket you know has something important in it. But this time she was right there in the memory with me, and I can’t honestly say that I was surprised. It wasn’t as if she had taken anything, or moved anything, or left something behind. No, it was just the fact that she’d been there, and now anytime I went back to that memory, she would always be there. The one place that had been only mine was a place we shared now. To her credit, that was exactly what she wanted, and she had never pretended otherwise.

But now I knew that I could never be alone with it, and as it turns out, that was all I’d wanted: to keep it mine. It wasn’t as though I wanted to keep it away from her, but now it wasn’t mine anymore. And I hated that. And even more, I hated that I was the one who willingly handed it over to her.

There was really no one to be angry at, of course. She had asked, and I had said yes. She had even been appreciative and told me that she loved me for sharing myself with her. None of that was the problem, and that was why there was nothing I could do about it. So instead, I lay there motionless in bed with my arm wrapped around her, the light from between the blinds still striping my forearm. As I listened to her shallow breaths, I felt like I was being pulled apart in two opposite directions. I was grateful for how gentle and considerate she had been with my most cherished memory, and yet at the same time I regretted so deeply having shared it at all that I couldn’t sleep whatsoever the rest of that night.

And the worst part was knowing the whole time that it was a regret I would never be able to share with her.