Healing Machine for Luca
For the fear of embarrassment and shame that keeps me from doing the things you want
You're at a party, and you say something terrible. You lie awake that night, playing the memory over and over again. There you are, and there's the woman you were talking to. There's that terrible thing you said, and the awkward silence that followed. You play it again. This time the tape jams, and you have to rewind it to see the good part, the really painful part.
As you listen to the hum of the party spinning in reverse, you wonder if you've always played your memories back on VHS tapes like this, and where you even got this giant box of a TV-VCR. You play the tape back from the moment you opened your mouth, and it gets stuck again. You pop it out and see that it's unspooled. You try to wind it up again with your fingernail, but it's no use, so you chuck it in the pile with all the other moments you've replayed to death.
"Thanks," your boyfriend says, grabbing it from the pile. You wonder how long he's been standing there, waiting for you to finish. He climbs a ladder and adds the VHS brick to the north wall of the house you've been renovating. Soon there won’t be any more tapes to play - they’ll be stuck there in the walls, silent and steady, glad to have found their true purpose.