Caitlin Cruser is a recently-graduated Creative Writing major preparing to return to the real world. She will probably pick up where she left off in the extremely fulfilling world of customer service, where customers WILL spit at her while she makes their sandwiches to order.

Before the milk in the fridge goes bad, I leave home for the last time

By Caitlin Cruser

My mom moves me into my last college dorm for my last year of college and for the last time, we unpack my half-nude poster of Phoebe Bridgers to stick to my wall. Its corners are bent, the yellow wash gone in the creases. The painted brick sweats in the spring. The poster falls often. 

“It’s not weird,” I say, as we place textbooks and heavy boxes on the corners to help flatten it.

“It’s not weird,” she assures me.

In the last two days, she has slept six hours and worked 20. She doesn’t show it. She is awake and drinking electrolytes and singing along to 70s music playing from her phone.

It’s our unofficial tradition: drive two cars across the state, unpack dorm supplies and lewd posters, and spend the night in my newly humanized dorm room. We bring home leftovers from a steakhouse and stuff them in my tiny fridge before watching a Disney movie from before I was born.

My mom, 55 and beautiful, always insists that I take the bed. “It’s your room,” she says. I go next door for an extra mattress. 

She puts on her nightgown and completes a thorough skin care routine over the small sink. By the time she was my age, she was married with a child. She never went to college. I imagine this is what it would look like if she did.  

We stay up late and talk about when I was younger. The books she used to read to me, the TV shows I watched on PBS after school. Was my everything as perfect as I remember it being? I ask her if what I remember of my childhood is accurate. If my memory is at all reliable. 

In some spots it is: as children, my siblings and I visited art museums and libraries multiple times a week. We raced up the Philadelphia Art Museum steps and sat in front of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. I tried to recreate them on a sketch pad with crayons. We spent summers on picnic blankets and winters in snow tubes. We were season passholders at our local public garden.

In others, my memory fails: I was not, in-fact, a gymnastics prodigy at six. 

My parents divorced when I was nine. My mom’s ability to fact-check my memory ends around there, except for Wednesdays, when we met for McDonalds in her apartment across town. I saw her after school, her in her work uniform and me in my grass-stained jeans. We sat on her new couch and ate dinner off collapsible tables.

She told me and my sister that she missed us. That she wished she could be around for everything, the way she was before, but that this would be better. Everyone would be happier. We believed her.

My mom doesn’t know the true size of the toad we found in the yard the summer after she moved out, or how many fireworks we set off that fourth of July. She doesn’t know how late we stayed up on school nights after she was gone.

As a writer, I am fascinated with memory.

I remember walking down the half-mile-long driveway to my house after the school bus dropped me off from elementary school. The weather was unremarkably warm and the sky unremarkably cloudless. I remember kicking a rock down the path, the way I always did.

In school, we read stories of events worth remembering. Of strength during war, of courage under oppression. Memory, I concluded, was reserved for important events.

Under the warm blue sky, I said to myself, “I will not remember this moment in a year.”

But I did. I still do. As clear as yesterday, I remember that walk. 

What I don’t remember: my first date. My first kiss. The first time I had sex. I know whom each was with, as if the answers were written on the back of flashcards, but I can’t place myself there. I can’t picture the nervous smiles or feel the sweaty hands. The images of those nights are lost.

Those memories seem important. They are defining moments of my youth, or at the very least anecdotes. When was the last time I remembered them? When did my brain deem those memories unimportant while instead hanging onto lyrics from Miley Cyrus’s debut album? (Note: Miley warned twice that she couldn’t or wouldn’t “be tamed” before riding a wrecking ball in the nude.)

I can’t blame myself. Memory is often heavily affected by poor mental health, something that I dealt with while simultaneously trying to complete a checklist of “firsts.”

I started showing symptoms of depression in fifth grade. I had no interest in the books I used to love. I forgot about tests. I didn’t attend a full week of school the whole year. 

I begged my dad to homeschool me. I told him Miley Cyrus was homeschooled. I accredited her success to it. He told me that I was not Miley Cyrus. 

I was officially diagnosed in high school. The words came from a man in a white coat in a room with no pictures or sharp objects. “You got it from me,” my dad says, casually, as if it were his hooded eyes or dark hair.  

Most times, I write off the failure of my memory as a consequence of the disorder. I try to be okay with that. I know that it could’ve taken much more. My dad lost his job while experiencing a particularly difficult bout of depression. All I lost was the memory of a likely poorly coordinated kiss. 

Sometimes, I write to remember. Most times, I write to not forget. I write poems about the deck that surrounded my childhood home. I write essays about days spent rolling down snow-covered hills. I flourish them with every detail I have. The sound of the leaves. The color of my little sister’s cheeks. I give the memory a new home. To have a witness. To have some kind of proof those moments happened at all. 

As my mother falls asleep on a twin-xl mattress, lying with a borrowed throw blanket that doesn’t cover her feet, I finish hanging my now-flat poster. My mom looks like a permanent fixture in my room, but this time tomorrow she will be gone. I wish she could be around for everything, the way she was before.

It is quiet, the only sounds our alternating breaths, deep and rhythmic. I make sure to acknowledge the moment as unmemorable, hoping that my brain will prove me wrong. 

Winner of the Gerald Stern Poetry prize and the Joan Didion Nonfiction Award, Caitlin Cruser lives and writes in Western Pennsylvania.