How to Date a Nerd

Chapter 8 - Chugging Fest for the Broken Hearts

Hurriedly, I pushed the call bell and waited for the nurses. Sarah looked like she was suffocating. I kept my distance, afraid to touch her, unable to do anything. Just seeing her in extreme pain made me want to run away. I couldn’t bare it anymore. At last, the nurses came and asked me to step out of the room for a while.

For what seemed like hours, I stared nonsensically at the glaring white walls of my hospital room until I could memorize all the microscopic cracks and the small blotches of paint that peeled off the concrete. Damaged. Someone should go fix that. It was starting to tick me off.

 The door opened almost stealthily, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Not sure. Nothing made sense anymore.

Amnesia. In my head, I laughed ironically at the mere word, though I never moved a facial muscle, or even blinked regularly. What was the point? If breathing was voluntary, I’d be dead by now. Amnesia. I kept repeating the word in my mind, hoping to get a grasp of what it meant for me. For one, it wasn’t a myth after all and because of that damned word, it seemed like I lost everything to the world.

“Leonard,” Myrna’s gentle voice called out to me as she entered the room, a medicine carrier on her hand. “Time for your pain meds. How’s your arm? Does it hurt anywhere?” The nurse approached cautiously and sat on a chair looking at me.

I kept staring at the wall, wanting to nod but couldn’t, wanting to admit that yes, it hurt… in my chest. So bad. Like hell. No, not my arm. They could very well be sawing it off and I won’t have noticed. Blankly, I shifted my gaze to the nurse, then to the pills in the small medicine cup in her hand. Would those take away the pain?

With her brown eyes fixed on me, Myrna placed a hand on my shoulder. “You’re young, Leonard. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It is,” I replied vacantly before I took the pills and popped them into my mouth without asking what they were for. Maybe I’d get an overdose and die.

“Sarah’s stable now. I just gave her some meds to calm her down. She’s just asleep and would be up in no time.” She handed me a glass of water which I ignored. I just swallowed the bitter pills and felt them get caught inside my throat. “You know, so far, we had two patients who had temporary amnesia. After a week or two, they came to their senses and got back to their respective lives.”

Falsely unaware of her presence, I didn’t respond and kept counting the flaws on the wall. Even now, I kept on hurting Sarah. It was like every time I’m near her, something’s bound to go wrong.

“If you want to talk about it, I’ll be here okay?” she told me before going out.

Temporary. Maybe. But what if not? Sarah couldn’t even remember that I existed. Was it just a coincidence that she lost her memory dating back to that day, seconds before we met? Or maybe subconsciously, she just really wanted to obliterate any trace of my existence in her life.

No matter how much I wanted to hold her, no matter how much I wanted to tell her over and over again how much I love her, it won’t matter because it’d just be a bunch of meaningless words.

* * *

“Are you sure you want to go home?” Arthur asked for the third time.

“Yeah, Dad,” I answered, getting into his car and slamming the door shut. For the last two weeks, people had been telling me to go home, take a break, rest. And now that I decided that it was time to take the advice, everyone seemed to think otherwise. Downright ironic.

Dad just nodded and revved the engines. I noticed he was driving slower than normal, leaving me more time to wallow in my thoughts. My mind was point blank. After this, what? The question was left hanging. Since Sarah was taken away from me by some sadistic God of Memories, all my future plans seemed worthless.