Forgotten to Remembered

Laurel Carter

Laughter and joy once filled the space. It had no clue where this joy came from, why He was always laughing, or why the one that made him smile would always come dancing into the room. The beast would run around on her little feet knocking into the table and destroying whatever was on top of the glass. This went on for months—it missed the touch of his fingers as He had once spent hours with it. However, those hours had never been joyful for Him; the hours spent with it were always accompanied by yelling and loud noises. It was His escape, His comfort when nothing else could take Him away, it could. Now it was left behind, lost to the one that made Him smile: forgotten. A spark of hope would wash through every piece of its body when it thought it caught his eyes, yet he never truly looked at it, dusting away in the corner. Just the walls of his mind or the pictures on the wall behind it. 

That was until something changed. It was not sure what, but the one that made him smile and laugh, like it used to be able to, stopped appearing through the archway. The laughter stopped echoing from his now lifeless room where the voice of that one, that would make his eyes dance, rang out. This place had lost life and there was nothing anything could do to bring the light back into His eyes. The dog must have sensed the change in Him soon after. For days that small beast would sit by the door and wait for Him to come back, or he would let the beast inside his, what seemed, permanently closed entrance to the lifeless space he slept. After what seemed like weeks it started to lose hope that He would never recover, that was until, at around two am when he came out of the soulless space and reached for it. Dusting it off, he looked at It with a quizzical look and remembered the times he used to use it on a weekly if not daily basis. The time with it had been lost completely, given to the one that made him laugh. 

Its hopes rose too quickly because He put it back down in the corner and rushed to the lifeless space. It felt its own body sag within itself, retreating to the inner lower bout. Next thing it knows there is a sound coming from behind the closed door. Unfamiliar yet homely. This sound was similar to the noise it would use to make with him. He comes dashing out the fixed door, the sound of papers fluttering to the ground coming from inside the haunted room, and snatches it from the corner. For the first time in what felt like a year, it got to see inside the room once more. The bed was rumpled and unmade, clothing was thrown everywhere, and a controller stationed at the base of his bed. With careful hands, he rests it on his quad. The slight movement to the headstock shot hope into them. Then their sound rang out, flat and off-key, but it had made noise. With the tightening of the tuning pegs and their noise ringing out once more, light flashed into his eyes. A small almost unnoticeable smile tugged at his lips, but it still noticed. Glee and pride swell through the sound hole as the strumming continued. This guitar was being used once more. This continued for the next week, each time the guitar thought it would be the last time, but he kept picking it up each day. Testing new cords and piecing together songs and following melodies. Warmth and life slowly returned to the once lifeless room. The beast pranced around, in time with the guitar as He hit its strings. After all this time, he remembered the guitar and sought it out to bring him back to life. As time went on, the sounds the guitar made become fluid and gentler.