A river crossing

The surface is not water yet it is a river they are crossing. The river they are crossing consists not of water but of memories. Memories of past lovers. Perhaps every single one of them. How does he know this? Or specifically, how does he know they are HIS past lovers not some random gathering of the ghosts of women collected randomly? Because each does in fact evoke a memory. And those memories, transient and temporary as they are, do connect him in some way with the fleeting sensation of a past which he is struggling to recollect.

The oarsman raises his arms and pushes his oar into the bank, shoving off. The water is shallow and we feel the bottom of the boat scraping along the shoal underneath the surface of the water until suddenly they surpass the shoal and they are finally moving. But just before they do, whilst still dragging along the shoal, as the oar is digging into the sandbar for propulsion, the first murmur of complaint, the first vague memory is speaking out to him from the water.

"Marsaw, the question", his ear translates through the watery gurgling, the misinterpretion of a brook, "is not who you are in your past but where you are in your past."

He hears nothing again for several moments. His ear cocked, he glances quizzickly to Kinderton who is busying himself with a pocket map of a city Marsaw cannot make out from the cover. "Did you hear that?" he asks Kinderton but Kinderton is lost in his own thoughts, unavailable at the moment.

"No one can hear me, Marsaw. No one but you." the voice assures. There is no figure, now shadowy outline to accompany the voice. "I am your first love. Don't worry, I understand that you don't remember, that you have no recollection of your past so it is not insulting to me that you cannot remember your first love. You must be lost in this absence of memory and my heart hurts for you, your pain is mine. There is not much of a history to recollect anyway I'm afraid. It would be more precise to say you were infatuated with me rather than you loved me. Hence why I am so close to the shoal. The deep sea is where you will find your real, abiding loves. The painful, wrenching loves...."

"What was your name? Or sorry, rather what IS your name? How come I can't see you?"

"You can't see me because you do not remember me. I am not even the shadow of a memory. You see in some cases, with the correct technology, even the blind can make out a shadow from time to time, or shadowy figures. But in your case, you are completely without sight into the past. You are lucky you can even hear my voice, a radio frequency happened upon by chance in the middle of the night. But in answer to your question, my name is Lara."

"Is your voice the same voice you had when as you say I was infatuated with you? I ask because it seems memory or not, I cannot recognise your voice and I would have imagined that hearing the voice of a girl I was infatuated with would strike a chord somewhere..."

"Well, I hadn't thought of the question before Marsaw but no, I suppose my voice is not the same. I was 12. You were 12. I suppose in that time since there has been an increase in both the thickness and length of my larynx. The breathiness of my voice as you might have remembered has decreased and the tone of my voice has become fuller and richer."

"Do you know how, if I was infatuated with you, that the infatuation faded?"

"Of course. I could tell you it was not the infatuation that faded. I could tell you that the infatuation was simply the inundation of your brain with Plenylethylamine."

Kinderton clears his throat loudly. "That's bullocks." he mutters to himself, whispering into his hand something about capsule forms of neurotransmitters and cheap mind-enhancer supplements. He coughs again but is ignored.

"The cycle of inundation concluded," Lara continued. "But look, we were young. Too young to even know what it was that attracted us to each other in the first place. You liked me and I liked you. We were not torn apart by that attraction. The school year ended. You became infatuated with breasts. Or specifically, the more enhanced breasts of another girl, just before the end of the school year. My breasts were underdeveloped at the time. You even told me once, just before the end of the school year that you'd have liked me better if I'd have had larger breasts. It was honest but it was a cliche at the same time. You weren't even sure what you would have done with larger breasts at the time. You hadn't even had a nipple in your mouth other than your own mothers' at the time."

"But I don't understand. This seems like a rather insignificant encounter. A brief infatuation when I was too young to even understand what infatuation was. Why do you appear before me now or, I suppose more precisely, why are you talking to me now, especially after all these years?"

"Because, Marsaw, I remained a small-breasted woman even after puberty. I remember trying to will enhancement of my breasts. I remember how useless your throw away comment made me feel, how inadequate. I carried that sense of inadequacy with me, year after year after year. My breasts remained small. I became preoccupied with them. I didn't find myself attractive. Even though I had a pretty, one might almost say beautiful face, it didn't matter to me. All I could think about was the inadequacy of the size of my breasts."

"But surely you don't hold the remark against me after all these years? I mean, even you admit it was a throw away comment. How could a 12 year old boy possibly be held responsible for it?"

"Oh Marsaw, it is not the comment itself. You're right. The comment itself was not something you could reasonably be held responsible for. It was the sincerity of the insult that stung the most. You see even then you were too stupid, or let's say too unaware to realise that something you considered to be a harmless, honest remark could have such a lasting, harmful effect on someone. You will always be like that, Marsaw. Carelessly honest, incessantly insenstive. This was just the first lasting example of it. Me."

"But surely you found love eventually anyway, didn't you?"

"That isn't the issue at all here, Marsaw. I am not here necessarily to provoke guilt. I am here perhaps to make you a little more aware of your historical propensity for insensitivity, particularly where it concerns women. And to feed you a memory of your past. Ironically, I am called upon to feed that memory to you through the breast. An unremarkable, unlactating breast, but a feeding breast nonetheless."

The oarsman is remarkably quiet other than his steady breathing. Penderton has fallen quiet too, as though in a trance.

My heart beat races and a vague fear surrounds me. Everywhere around me is black and yet through this blackness I feel the touch of a hand behind my head and neck, guiding my face slowly forward and downward. I can only imagine it is a hand because I can imagine that I feel fingers It could have been a foot and toes I suppose, for the sake of honesty but my imagination was fueled by the vague memory of what a hand would feel like.

And as my head was guided slowly forward and toward I felt what I presumed to be a nipple brush against my lip.

"Open your lips, Marsaw. I know how much the size of my breasts once displeased you but if you open your lips and allow my nipple inside, if you caress the areola with your tongue, go on, gently. I know you can't remember doing this and certainly you have never done it with me before because you found my breasts too small to consider fondling but there you go Marsaw, mmmm. You see? My breasts are not so displeasing after all, are they?"

Kinderton is muttering again, coughing into his hand. "The piloerection of her nipples is being caused by the hormonal distribution of arousal, not because of a maternity cycle. She is not lactating and the milky sensation she is trying to make you imagine by sucking on her nipples is in fact a bitter memory, not an increase in Oxytocin which, I would point out is another form of neurotransmitter. Don't say I didn't warn you...."

But I cannot deny arousal by this sensation, particularly in light of her own clear arousal which she emphasises with deep, protracted moans.

I do taste something released into my mouth. Is it fluid? Is it the secretion of milk? It's difficult to tell. The only fluid I have any recollection of is alcohol and this is most certainly not alcohol.

Gradually, her gasps become almost inaudible. I continue to be enveloped in darkness, a thick blackness. Her gasps are replaced by her voice at 12.

We are in a class room. I see a boy, short blonde hair, heavily freckled face standing in front of a small breasted girl with long straight black hair. They are conversing. At first I see them conversing although I cannot hear a word that is spoken and gradually, as though donning clothing, cloaking myself in a hooded garment, I find myself in the flesh of the boy, I feel my mouth shaping the words the prepubescent is speaking. I hear a voice that for a moment, I recognise as my own.

I am overcome by an inexplicable sadness as though I have visited the grave of a dead friend whose memory is too faded to recollect with any clarity.

I assume the girl beside the body or memory I am temporarily inhabiting is Lara. I feel nothing for her. I know deep in some recess of the memory that I did in fact feel a great infatuation for her once. I could recall, for example, that my initial infatuation for her was stimulated not so much by her as a change in my perception of her which had been invoked by the fear that she was being wooed by my strongest chess competitor. There was an afternoon of wanting to win her simply because she was not mine and leaning, so it seemed to me, towards another and I'd wanted to possess her as my own.

And months or perhaps only weeks later, it was over.

I had in fact, moved on to a blonde with more developed breasts. It had been apparent to all of our classmates and I had chosen in the ensuing days, to pretend that Lara would feel as happy as I did about this movement. But I could hear in her voice that she was making things difficult, that she was not as understanding as I'd have liked to imagine.

I could hear her asking me why I had abandoned her, why I had chosen to be with someone else, a blonde with more developed breasts when only a few weeks before I had been proclaiming some undying emotion for her, Lara.

I could think of nothing but the truth to lean upon as an answer. It was an underdeveloped truth, no doubt. A 12 year old's sense of truth is dulled by a lack of understanding and context.

"She has nice tits," I heard myself explaining. "Look at yours. They're small. Tiny. There is nothing for me to touch. Nothing for me to put my mouth around. Believe me Lara, if you had bigger tits, we could be together right now and who knows, maybe over the summer your tits will get bigger too. It happened to Diana and it happened to Annette. Yours will probably too. And look, we'll see each other over the summer break. Call me..."

I feel a slap across my face. It is Kinderton who is shaking me by the shoulders. "You were too far in there, Marsaw. You stopped breathing. I had to wake you. Sorry for slapping you but it seemed you were undergoing some sort of syncope episode and I was concerned you would not come out of it in time."

"In time for what?"

"In time to avoid brain damage brought on by the loss of oxygen to the brain, what else? Now stop asking silly questions and keep focused on the darkness out there. Soon enough the next image will find you..."

"But what is this all about Kinderton? You didn't really elaborate on this at all. Am I really going to have to sit on a boat ride living through all these negative past experiences?"

"What makes you think they will all be negative?"