Luana Wu (9) | STAFF REPORTER
There was an old, abandoned house on the outskirts of town. People used to say that it was filled with ghosts and restless spirits that would haunt you forever. However, it was more than a haunted house. In the backyard, there was a garden. It wasn’t just any garden; it was a memory garden.
A memory garden was exactly what it sounded like. People could go and “plant” their memories in the garden. These memories were in the form of flowers. Although, once you planted a memory, the memory would be so faint that you would hardly remember it.
The only people who would want to erase a memory out of their minds forever were the desperate ones. I’d visited the garden myself a few times over the years, and I’d seen sad, angry, grieving people plant a memory and look relieved after it was gone. It was like a form of healing to those people, I supposed.
I’d only planted one memory, and that had been the one where I’d seen my father scream and hit my mother. Things hadn’t been the same at home lately, as my mom had just lost her job and my dad had large amounts of debt to pay. He blamed her for our family being so poor. That night when he had the nerve to hit her… I couldn’t take it so I had erased it. Since once planted in the garden, you would never be able to get it back.
It hadn’t mattered anyways, since it was no more than a speck in the back of my mind. I was grateful for it and today, I had another memory to plant. It wasn’t quite a memory, but memories of a person. I wanted him gone forever from my mind.
I strolled along the road, anger pulsing through my body. I couldn’t wait to plant those memories in the garden. There was something just so satisfying about going through the whole process. Soon enough, I reached the house.
It was half crumbling, and vines were creeping all around the walls. A huge willow tree stood just outside the house, its branches providing a cover over the walk path. I walked around the house and into the backyard.
There was a sign in the garden that read: no pain, no regrets. It was so fitting because that was the whole point of the memory garden. Once you committed to planting your memory, it was done. You couldn’t take it back. No regrets indeed, I thought.
Luckily, it wasn’t too busy today and as I swept my eyes over the garden, I noticed significantly more black flowers. Black flowers meant that the owner of the memory had died or it was an evil, twisted memory. I grimaced; I’d bet that it was more evil memories than deaths.
In order to plant your memory, you needed a flower. There were boxes of different kinds of flowers that people could choose from. I picked up a pink tulip, twirling it in my fingers. Pink reminded me of love and today, I had definitely not come for love. I placed the tulip back in the box. I scanned the boxes for a few more moments before deciding on a rose that looked like it had been dipped in blood.
I found an empty space in the far left of the garden and knelt. I cupped the rose in my palms and using one of the thorns on the rose’s stem, I stabbed it into the pad of my thumb. Drops of blood fell onto the soil. I smeared my blood over the petals and said, “I give it all away. Take it.”
Then I pictured all those memories of him and imagined it going into the flower. It felt like I was dreaming. Floating, even. All I could see were the lies he’d tell me, everything he’d promised me, all the pain he’d caused… and then, they were all gone. I gasped. There was this scraping sensation in my mind as the memories faded. The rose that I had been holding floated in midair, glowing with red light. It fell onto the soil, roots already growing to anchor it to the soil.
I sucked in a sharp breath and stood. My legs were shaky as I took one step away from the rose. My thumb was still bleeding, but I didn’t care. As I made my way out of the garden, I caught an old lady staring at me. She was staring at me with such pain that I looked away. Her expression made me think over what I had just done. Was I really right to take away those memories?
Shaking my head, I pushed those thoughts away. No pain, no regrets, I told myself.
