How should I remember Alenia? More specifically, how could I remember Alenia? I ask myself, sometimes at 7th Central’s streetside cafe, when there’s a lurking emptiness seizing my hands and lips, and moments beside an empty desk or in an empty double bed, or when I realize there’s no longer the scent of Libre Intense filling my apartment; by when, I’ll be reminded that Alenia had truly disappeared, leaving no trace of her presence in my living, not even a stranded clump of hair, a squashed sofa, or burdened piano keys. The Company paper, those dust-collecting financial spreadsheets, recently I’d flipped through them, and I couldn’t tell which you’d typed in among works of countless other white collars. You were within, I was certain, and recalling the weakest memory I had of those repetitive numbers, I searched through the stacks, and those stacks of stories throughout the 9th to 5th Street, but I never found you. 

If I’d counted right, you'd lived already for 20 years, 7 months, and 27 days ’til today. And it couldn’t be more than 3 months since we first met. I ask, subsequently, almost like an empty lament - how meager is my presence toward your existence? Every morning now, I’ll find myself without hold, when seeing her absence in bed and realizing it couldn’t of an easier matter for her to be gone. Oh, Alenia, only regarding the numbers I was ever certain of; those numbers, aligned, categorized, organized, imprisoned inside Excel cells, share equally every bit of our common experience, is everything I control. Oh, Alenia, should I be asking you how could and should I remember you? Could you gather my hoarse voice breaking through the mass?

We couldn’t. I shouldn’t remember her, neither should I remember to not remember her. I shouldn’t plant these thoughts into my routine, or burn them into those silences with unsurpassed length of time at the apartment or the Company; it's against the time. We always stayed in the past, like Alenia, like childhood, like Willem, but you run against the clock. You force Willem into your memories, 'though you never met him; you made me forever remember the Thursday Willem disappeared completely, and that unhinged unease, a tremble behind my skull, when I arrived at the cubicles. By lunch, I figured out the buzz came from the suspiciously organized desk beside my cubicle, where Willem supposedly would be - earpieces into the charging cell, pencils retained in the Company-labeled mugs, sharpened, aligned like pipes in-and-through an organ, and the flipped shot glasses in the corner. Certainly, by then, I’d realized the absence of his figure in the office throughout the days before. 

On the tram, traveling through the sandwiched silhouettes of high-rise office buildings at 60 kph, I felt embraced by an image of those unhinged sharpened pencils and the arrangement of things, and I had a warm feeling of usuality in all. The sharpened Company-pencils, stabbing faintly my skin, dizzying my smoggy vision, embracing me with a generous warmth. There emerged a 27-year-old Marlboro addict, before my eyes, lighting himself a journey beside a pile of easily-flammable financial spreadsheets; that was certainly Willem. But there was a more familiar set of compositions poking my weak skin, a structure of furniture, details, and items, of the current morning, which I suddenly realized was so imprinted among my contacts, that there was an alienating unfamiliarity of Willem draining cartons after cartons of Marlboros beside the financial spreadsheets. That there was an innate favoring of the emptiness of that armchair, those flipped shot glasses, and the dangerously sharpened pencils, instead of smoking white-collar working through his data. I repeated this to myself, and between facades of office high-rises, I was travelling 60 kph, traveling between flashing structures of concrete pipes and rectangular pillars and outlines of steel neurons, like an unbreakable potato, up and around, from this to that and there to here. By then, I was convinced that Willem had completely disappeared. Willem was long gone. And “Riverside,” the announcer read. I got off mish-mashed among commuters dressed in leisure suits, like a droplet of water to the wave, like time, and there was Riverside, where I lived for 7 years.

Riverside Place and Riverside Palace stood before and after the tram station, their vast facades filled with gorgeous advertisement boards. They supposedly named it Riverside because there used to be a Riverside Raceway when this place was the suburbs, where they did illegal racing back in the '60s. It was all unhinged, thinking about men without helmets slaloming around corners with those hideous tiny-wheeled petrol machines, screaming Hallelujah before rejoining the race; but they did it anyway. And before Riverside Raceway, there was a Riverside town, established by Sheriff Riverside, but that was purely past. And now there’s a Riverside Station bundled within city streets and high-rises, and now before or after lunch or dinner we’ll say “before Riverside, there was a Riverside Raceway,” but the Raceway was long-gone. There used to be people complaining about losing the Raceway, but I felt alright, firstly because the city brought me here, second the Raceway was to go anyway, third Riverside Place had great sandwiches, and I thought it a fair exchange smothering the unhinged petrol heads among us for standardized office spaces and apartments that silently took more grounds. Eventually, the old farts would trample through a sentence like an English gentleman in the countryside, “Those young fellas, they don’t know how to properly behave; they don’t even know how to drive,” like they weren’t reckless when pimples colonized their faces. Face it old-timers: we’d lost anyway. The city was all harmless. The city pushed things forward from madness into civilization. It’s never gonna flip anything upside-down.

It won’t, Alenia, I promise to you. Everything was equally placed the day your Libre Intense became no different to street air, your figure became mish-mashed inside the shifting crowd of white collars. But I promised. Yet I couldn’t. Your absence, I admitted to you, had become a repetitive regret in my routine. I have preplanned time to remember about that once at the Bar&Grill, when you pissed me off by talking coquettish with that server girl, if it didn’t exist; and that wobbling tourist’s attraction boat on the Rhine, but if they’re nonexistent, or to disappear as you did, or if none of the locations happened, were you just adoppelgänger of my imagination, an evolution and projection of my thoughts? - or simply of lucky fate - I couldn’t ponder whether you were there or not, through our tough moments or relationship breakdowns, or when we exchanged a film roll and a Pentax like a grassroots version of The Gift of the Magi. Alenia, you disappeared too obtusely, I woke up and found myself alone on the double bed, that was your gig. Your clothes, decorations, and make-up chests all vanished, when that unhinged unease showered my front and back. So without hold, without control, I gazed at the wall, the glassware, and unwashed dishes, you were nowhere, and nothing of your trace was anywhere anymore. How’d I remember Alenia? I asked myself, brushing my teeth, taking a shower, lotioning my face, making coffee, stashing documents into my backpack for another day going through financial spreadsheets, I locked the door; I opened it up again to see if she was fooling around with me, hiding inside a closet or some secret room. You weren't anywhere; or you were until I opened that door, and she chose to hide behind the curtains because of a certain rationale I could never understand. Something I couldn’t ever understand, like every distant morning.

“‘Today, Willem completely disappeared, like a worn-out pair of leather boots stuffed in the most obscured corner of Her Majesty’s closet.’” 

I shuffled around my head across the pillow, and there, Alenia scanned through my leather-covered diary by her morning Americano. She turned around, an unfamiliar face, and an unfamiliar smile, “Oh, Michelle, what’s with the metaphors and similes here?” I was then determined to attend my morning agenda of face-cleansing and teeth-brushing, followed by flips of bookpages and a strange giggle behind my back. Her face, in a warm, vague scarlet frown, had a pure quality of “young and naive” - “What’s with the Beatles reference?” - a charming curvature from her forehead down to her chin, I couldn’t answer her question, and she wouldn’t expect me to stutter a word - “There’s no date on this” - the reflected sunlight that somehow made its way through the clouds and forest of concrete structures and onto Alenia's skin. The days, it’s pure luck. It’s all luck that these moments weren’t evergreen. They wilted. In fact, loving memories were the sole evidence to prove love, and through the actions love was lively; if they'd disappeared, where would love to depart to?- into the crowd, onto the sky, deep inside the jungle. Those innumerable specifics of lives, like our usual convenient breakfast in a 7/11, chinwagging over the accounts and entries, I was convinced of your visit through these moments. I could remember that (I’m reenacting our morning routine exactly now), we walked together to the Riverside station, where we would arrive at Central after seven stations, and she would drag me to walk another 3 minutes to a Costa Coffee to serve ourselves two extra-large Americano if you couldn’t find time to make it at home. Her nose was smoked all rose red by a wavering line of steam arising inside the lid’s opening. “Would you believe it?” We navigated ourselves through the steaming manholes, “Noodles. He filed in a request for a one-way trip to a random Pacific island.” “Did he expect the Company to say ‘hey yeah’ to that,” I said, pushing the revolving door fast so she was stuck outside, stomping her feet while puffing warm breath onto the glass facade. You were mildly scowling like a milk-deprived kitten, but I knew she didn’t mean it. “You don’t want me anymore?” I smiled at her, and she smiled back. We went up the elevator: we made things that didn’t make sense make sense. “If you could’ve felt him gone earlier, maybe we could’ve saved him, together,” she whispered beside my ears inside the moving box, flying upward, and time was almost dilated, “that’s a story to tell at our family dinner.”

I promised I would try to save him. I asked my coworkers and put up posters. I dialed to the police station. I went to Marlboro stands along 4th-8th Central. He was nowhere man. Since that week, I found myself stuck in this conversation of reminding people of his Marlboro addiction after I mentioned Willem’s name and people shaking their heads. To cope, I bought a pack of Marlboro, scarlet and white, and that was the Flute. They nodded, laughed, and even ran around, especially the cafe girl. She was all excited ranting through your weird acts whenever you had a stomachache from those shots of coffee you tried to stuff into your stomach to finish another long day’s work. She laughed every time, and eventually, she gave me her number. That was what she was trying to do and thought I was doing. And since I rejected her, those things stopped working; I could feel their laughter of your Marlboro act weakening, their interests rippling away, and their expectation growing like the day before yesterday and yesterday and tomorrow and later on. That was their attitude, their logic. They listened and believed in whatever I was saying; they believed my words, and an establishment of a man Willem, no matter how I explained to him a Cuban or Russian agent; they nodded and said, “Oh Willem, of course, that nuclear physicist/salesman at K-Mart.” But I couldn’t bear my laugh. There was nothing Willem in those words, in their mechanical transitions between a lackadaisical face to one all overwhelmed with hilarity. Willem, I’m sorry to make you become such a character, but I promise they never knew your lastname.

And thank you, you made Alenia possible. They replaced you with Alenia, and there she was at the doorbell, dressed professionally like she was prepared to transfer all data from the paperback spreadsheet onto the electronic ones. We went out for the first time, and several nights after, and we made it work. We talked everywhere, regarding the city, politics, history, and future, and we would never forget another’s body and tenure of a physical form. And that sound. We were there, there, inside the city. By then, I’d picked up smoking, probably because nicotine was addictive, not that I didn’t know. I just wanted to feel it. So I did it, and I felt floating. And quickly enough, I started smoking like Willem, before the easily flammable financial spreadsheets, on the balcony, exactly like you. And I felt like you, I could feel your instinct inside the tobacco. So I was standing on a concrete barrier, a remnant of one that used to run around the Raceway, which only remained a narrow piece of grassfield of wilted grass, beside me was Alenia. We and the grass field were sandwiched between two Riverside Place and Riverside Palace, forming a long strip of wasted grassland dominated by plant life, which was quite unhinged for an industrial city. I finished the thing, held her hand, and walked to the middle, where the weeds and undergrowth started clearing up, shedding sights of tarmac-profiled groundwork, now cracked by random greens. There, the concrete barriers extended alongside the broken road into the far-beyond empty field, but its end I couldn’t see, probably before that huge chimney from the rubber factory. The Riverside Place, the Riverside Palace, and the rubber factory seized our freedom of horizon, but on one side, that road was rolling on, and we felt like talking with the road; feeling her breath. The old Raceway was going on, toward the factory, parallel to the malls, but as we walked, we never felt going anywhere. It quickly evolved into a game of springing forward on the shattered road surface, navigating on distant tarmac continents, of course, much slower than the cars that used to travel through the part of the track years ago. We could hear the “vroom" of the wind and bustling streetcars’ beeps and rustles, and those modern electric cars, could I say how fantastic they looked faraway when they were placed on a piece of the horizon, pieced up with a sunset that came inevitably. Alenia was beside me. I could feel her breath. I took a Marlboro. “I can’t remember when you start puffing the sticks.” “I forgot either, doesn’t matter.” I lit the cigarette, and she suddenly held my arm, and slowly she said, “Please don’t make me disappear.” Her face was silhouetted by a golden sunshine. She looked into the shifting cars, “Can’t you see, we’re all gonna be abandoned like this place? When those things come out.” She pointed at those streetcars, “We can't even a difference, with you and me?” She stood on a piece of tarmac, which was tilted by a curbstone. She stood like a mountaineer, like Joan of Arc, I suddenly felt, when her scarf drift towards the rubber factory in the soft wind. There, we stood between the long stretch of wasteland, between two bustling malls, and she almost cried. Alenia, how could I remember you? How could I compare you with anything else? But you said that thing that burned my heart, “We weren’t nowhere different; We just instinctively self-differentiate until we stop!” She actually shed tears, or it was the industrial gas, but anyway, I didn’t know what to do but to keep puffing while looking at those huge advertisement boards standing alongside the side facades of the malls. They were hideous, compared to the front, and it brought some Soviet Union feeling to my heart - the paint and walling falling off, exposing holes of rough concrete and steel framework. Among the Cartier, Chanel, there was a megahuge poster of a local racing league, called Riverside Club. There on the board, it painted those little cars with a huge bonnet, rushing down a straight in their maximum capacity; those drivers, their faces dirtied by dust and petrol glams, their hair drifted backwards to the rubber factory, without a helmet they were all hardcore-purebred oldtimers. Nothing had changed about the factory: the chimney still stood so upright. But it wasn’t about the factory. Alenia had walked away, I saw her behind the puff rising from my mouth, to the center of the field, closer to the factory. I arrived there, and in the middle of the malls and the factory, she stood there; a plaque sat quietly beneath her feet. "Riverside Raceway,” it said. She stood close to that board, and for a moment, I thought she was born a part of that plaque, that she was a huge mushroom or some kind of weird parasitic fungus that grew out of that metal plaque, but my consciousness was quick on the scene to hit myself in the head. Alenia was a person, and a person could hardly be a part of a plaque or a fungi. But I laughed in my mind, and everything I could think of or remember was this joke when we were walking out of the grass field to our car.

We were supposed to have a sandwich at Riverside Palace, but you said you changed your mind. We walked back to the apartment, and you didn’t want to hold my hand. Those people, passed us by, and you embarrassed me so much, so I had my right to lament to you that night, it was all perfectly understood. But you couldn’t stand my thoughts, “Why would you be embarrassed, they were uninteresting people, like a Jell-O.” “I just don’t want to make our remaining time of life of people remembering our faltered moments." I tried to justify. “What if people never happen, then you’re perfectly alright? What if I tell you, those people were just you, and we were all ourselves, and if we stop paying attention, they’d just be not rendered, like a system running out of RAM.” She was definitely mad, unhinged - yes, that was the word to use. “What if I tell you, we don’t exist, and we’re just somebody else’s imagination, and we can just disappear if they want us to? All of these memories, they were… It’s not a matrix, it’s just you can control me so badly, you men are all control freaks.” That was a pure accusation. “Would you mind if I was suddenly not here? No, because you believed that I would always be here, existing in somewhere around the world. And your love’s all that.” What did you mean after all? “And I could see your face, you were happy, you were sad, and then you were ready to throw things away because they would just remain the same, wouldn’t they? You thought. The roads, the buildings, and the cities would be the same. Yes. Never upside-down” She sighed, in a weird denial of her own statement. I'm sorry Alenia, but I only stopped listening to your words only after that moment. “Yes, everything would be the same, with or without us, that was just a lame thought, like my cubicle.” She paused. “It was Willem’s. It is mine. It will be somebody else’s. This place, it was a Raceway, it is a mall, it was was a town, it will be so many things. And we are just simply a variant of so many things.” She paused again, and I sensed danger. “You could’ve saved Willem, if you’re not to put yourself into him, put him into this dire situation, if you can work your mind a bit more every day, he’ll be talking to us right here! And all those nostalghia in your books, those fake Beatles references and metaphors, they were nowhere.” Was she actually talking to me, and did she ever talk in the time that just lapsed? I asked myself while leaning against the apartment, and I felt a sturdy strength from my pocket, where there was a remaining cigarette. Where did it come from, now I realized, after some time, was from that structure, from tobacco of a certain time. You were right, Alenia. You could just be a part of that plaque like I could be a part of this apartment. In fact, we all were when our feet touched the floor here; even if we jumped, without making any contact with the construct itself, we were temporarily swimming in its air; its air was different from outside, because there was a thin panel of glass. You were right, the city was to flip things upside-down, and office high-rises were equally unhinged as a rubber factory chimney between two modern commercial malls, no matter how good the sandwich was. “Please don’t make me disappear, at least not completely; please don’t let me disappear completely.” You begged; your voice muttered inside the thick bedding, distorted like a pair of leather boots that was overused and now carelessly thrown into the darkest corner of the closet. I said “I wouldn’t.” 

The moon with the Earth was all shaken by that intense here and there and firmness of potato between people, that light wouldn’t near anybody, that once there was a tension there couldn’t be another method, that once I reached for myself I couldn’t find a single handle for grab when the equal materials were destroyed like my puffs of Marlboro (I couldn’t bear to light myself a stick, puffing while the apartment was breathing with me) which now and then, brought me into an ecstasy of realism. Those ashes were falling onto your skin, the last tempting thought-provoking my thinking of you. 

The next morning, my doctor called me early. It was a Saturday, so I wouldn’t know why. He said I need to cut it off, the puffing of cancer sticks. I agreed. I showered, cleaned my face, took the tram, and worked through spreadsheets as usual. As an employee of the Finance department, I achieved my maximum, creating a jaw-dropping fantastical record of closing 7 financial accounts a day. My employer was proud, presenting me with a little plaque with “Michelle” on it. Suddenly, everybody noticed Michelle. A hardworking white-collar Michelle, taking his liver out for the Finance department. Sometimes, I would join their conversation about Michelle, this mysterious person. They talked about how much they admired them, and I would ask how much I’d compared with him. They said “No." Alenia, you won again and again.

Some yesterdays ago I saw Willem. That day, I just finished working, and I was walking into the Central Station. He hadn't changed at all, so I could almost immediately tell. I closed in on him, squeezing through other people. Finally, he was beside me. I cried his name, but he didn't hear me; I tapped on his head, and he burst with anger, “What’s the matter with you?” “Is your name Willem Lastname?” “Yes.” “I’m Michelle Lastname.” “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you,” he said, “and cut it off, man. It’s never good for your health.” “What?” “Cigarette. They’re called cancer sticks for a reason. You stink of cigarettes.” I was unhingedly confused. Must be a mistake, I said to myself, and I followed the crowd of commuters into the tram. I spent two stations' time thinking about Willem and Alenia, and another station’s time went to thinking about why there’s no conclusion about my previous question - there’s nothing, simply their names, not even their faces, only sharpened pencils, plaques, flipped shot glasses, and fungi. That was all the hold I got, I thought, looking at the tram’s windows - the high-rises had huge front facades with huge advertisement boards, all gorgeous, looking like a clump of Jell-O, coming into the world like garlic plants and were destined to be taken at the roots, like a Beatles record that was to be only collected without ever laid on the turntable, like a pair of crushed used boots. Quickly, the buildings were flipping around like a hula loop, and the people’s figures around me disappeared. Indeed, the carriage was empty, and the world outside was turning. That was truly unhinged.

Silently I stood there, like a solemn aging statue, traveling 60 kph in the city. Then, I decided to sit down, maybe because I was tired, but I couldn’t remember now. Anyway, I sat down and took out the financial worksheets. I threw all of them on the ground and took out a cigarette, which was destined to be the last one, something cigarette addicts would never find determination to say. I lit it, puffed it, and threw it onto the paper. It burned fast and went to the carriage, and went to the flipping city. I was sitting like fire. I look at the city. Eventually, it was down to us, I said to myself. The gorgeous facades and delicate markings around the glass, I suddenly realized, had a strange usuality. I couldn’t resist it. The buildings, aligned in functional squares of roads were predicably amazing, a purebred aesthetics. And in every other place, there’re cities and structures, exactly like a copy before my eyes. But now, without regret, everything city was smoking, like a giant stick of cancer.