The Memory in the Margins
The Mirror - 2
Dear Angie,
I didn’t sleep much last night. I had put the map on the kitchen table, smoothed flat under a glass paperweight, and every time I got up for water or tea, I found myself standing over it again.
It isn’t just the word Evermere. The whole thing feels… known. The curve of the river, the jagged edge of the hills, the way the ink grows lighter where my old fountain pen must have been running dry. Aw geez, these are my lines. Drawn by me.
This morning I went up to the flat above the shop and pulled down the old cedar chest from the top of the wardrobe. I haven’t opened it in years. Really, not since I put away everything from that awkward, restless summer when I thought I’d be someone else by the time September came.
Inside were the things you’d expect in a memory box: postcards, ticket stubs, a cracked leather wallet that still smells faintly of my father’s tobacco. But at the bottom, beneath a yellow scarf I haven’t worn since I was seventeen, I found my sketchbook.
Not just any sketchbook. Yes, that one. The heavy, spiral-bound pad I carried everywhere, convinced I was going to be the next great illustrator of fantasy worlds.
The first pages were exactly what I remembered of half-finished landscapes, a few clumsy portraits, swirls of half-inked lettering. But further in, the drawings became maps.
Pages and pages of them. Places with names like Lantern Hollow, Ash Tree Hill, Red Bridge. All the same names on the one from the mirror.
And Evermere…always in the center.
I turned a page and found something I don’t remember drawing at all: a list, in the corner margin, written in my own seventeen-year-old hand.
Mirror (old)
Key (iron)
Map (sealed)
Find the lake
Don’t forget who you are
I don’t know whether to laugh or be afraid.
It’s as if the girl I was back then left me a scavenger hunt. One I abandoned so long ago I forgot I’d even started it.
But here’s the thing…finding the map in that mirror, after all these years, makes me think it didn’t forget me.
And now I’m wondering if I still have the map and the mirror, what about the rest?
I’m going to check the “unsellables” drawer at the shop tomorrow. You know the one, where I toss all the odd bits that come in with furniture: keys, buttons, coins, things no one claims.
Maybe the girl I was had more foresight than I gave her credit for.
And maybe she’s been waiting for me to catch up.
With a strange mix of dread and excitement,
Lila
Dear reader…
Have you ever rediscovered something from your childhood or teenage years that surprised you?
Do you think we sometimes leave clues for our future selves without realizing it?
How much do you trust your own handwriting as proof of a memory?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.