When Sarah pressed her warm lips to his neck, he had already eaten the Strawberries that would take their goodbye kiss and hide it away in the synaptic nooks and crannies of his gray matter.

When his brain flipped from blackout to daylight, he remembered that Sarah had been upset. Now, he was alone and sitting in his pickup, parked on the shoulder of a still road under an overcast teal sky. His head stuffed full of cotton. Empty plastic Strawberry containers piled up on the passenger seat.

He didn’t remember that she had told him that they couldn't see each other, as they stood next to a truck stop gas pump, holding each other tightly and shivering in the cold drizzle. He could not recall their tears, their good-byes, or her leaving in her father’s SUV.

He started the pick-up and drove onto the road. A Strawberry, nestled next to the windshield, jittered around on the dashboard. Reaching forward, he grabbed the fruit and popped it into his mouth. He would call Sarah tomorrow, he thought.

He road through the countryside, and ten years passed.

Sitting in the back of a car full of strangers that had just left a New Years Eve party, he listened to tales of Strawberry eating: in the downtowns of bustling cities, handfuls at casinos on the outskirts of town, slurping smoothies with street musicians, popping them at a friend’s wedding at the seaside, eating them wherever.

Sitting in the back seat with a large bucket of the red berries between his legs, he looked out the window at a horse walking along a stream shrouded in a tear of mist. Someone named Kate was chattering about how much she liked strawberries and tartar sauce. He picked three berries from the bucket, popped one, two into his mouth. Fruit and sweet saliva rolled in his cheeks, and then he swallowed.

From his coat pocket, he pulled out a small plastic box, his 21st birthday gift. A label on the box read: MEM THE BEST DRUG! RECOVER THOSE LONG BURIED STRAWBERRY MEMORIES, CLEAN AND UNDEFILED BY THE ACT OF REMEMBERING. THE ULTIMATE! BY LITMINOV ENTERPRISES, LLC. He flipped open the lid and removed one of the three small syringes in the box, as well as rubber tubing.

“You gonna do that, now?” Kate asked him, as he tied the tubing around his upper arm.

“Pull that tight, would you?” he asked. She obliged.

The drug wrapped him in a warm nap, as a random strawberry memory bubbled back.

It was a Christmas Party with his 6th grade church youth group.

The party had been held at his teacher’s house and featured a Secret Santa gift exchange. Lusting after one particular wrapped box, he’d knelt next to the tree where the gifts had been placed and held the package. He caressed the distinctive edges of a Whitman’s Sampler box of candy.

“Wow, I wonder what this could be ... I think this is the gift I’d like ... This could be a good gift ... I might like this one.”

He grew light-headed with the prospect of pralines, jellies, chocolate fudge, an infinite variety of crap, all arranged in their cardboard cells, their locations mapped out on the lid of the box. He degenerated into a drunk-like stupor. As it turned out, he was a mean candy drunk.

“Who do you think you are?” he asked the teacher’s boyfriend, who was picking a few peanut M&Ms from a dish. “Eating candy?”

Like hyenas congregating around a carcass, his insolence spread through a dozen Methodist middle schoolers. The pack ganged up on Mary Patterson. That night she had the simple misfortune of picking her nose while another kid was watching. They all teased her with taunts like “No wonder yer so stupid. You poked yer brain out picking yer nose”. Their taunting had reached a fever pitch when Angus McDougle, who sang in the youth choir and had a wonderful voice, asked her why she didn’t just kill herself.

As the car continued on its New Years Eve trek, he ate the third Strawberry, swishing the chewed fruit in his mouth to wash out the bad taste of the grade school memory.

And then he was in a hospital bed getting an IV drip. Kate held his hand, stroking the palm with her thumb.

She smiled. “Are you feeling OK?”

Apparently, they had been married for years. He had written her a love poem, rife with misspellings. They had gone on a few dates, followed by rather casual sex, quickly followed by a baby. They each had affairs of mutual self-destruction. And then another baby.

And then later a car crash sent them all flying off the highway and into a tree; he used the second syringe at home, alone. The rain drizzled departure at the truck stop flooded back to him. An old loss merged with new losses. His chest broke with sobs, mended with a few shots of vodka and a fist full of strawberries.

The last syringe remained unused, as his body grew older. Hair grayed and fell out. Untamable eyebrows. Winded after a walk up a flight of stairs. Weight gained, then gone again, giving way to bony hips. Sexual desire, strangely increased, just enough to make unwelcome comments that made young women uncomfortable.

One bright day when he was not yet dead, he walked. The distance made his fallen arches ache, so he settled down in a spot at the seaside. The waves rolled, and people drifted by.

With a slow trembling hand, he took the last syringe out of his box and tried to wrap the rubber tubing around his arm. He stopped a young passerby. “Pull that tight, would you?” The young person obliged.

A plunge of the syringe and then waiting for the memory to wash up like foam from a broken wave sliding stealthily along a seaside shore.