How to Forget

im posting this at 1 am lmao

I don't know where I lost myself.

Maybe it was in the car, or maybe it was after I was dragged out, or maybe it was before. I have no way of figuring it out on my own. Everything I understand comes from the swarm of doctors around me, all sympathetic and glued to their protocol. They don't want to tell me more than they have to. I have no prior knowledge to dig up, all of it swiped by a traumatic blow to the head. All I have is the miracle of English.

My other dilemma is that I don't know where to find myself, either. My childhood milestones are now lodged in a pole somewhere from when my brain scattered them across the cold and amnesia-inducing metal. I was an A+ student apparently. I was a kind young man. I was a complexity. Everyone my age is ahead of me now. I have no enemies, but I also have no friends. Every passion, every goal, every human connection -- erased. I am a blank slate. A lot of the time people think that's a blessing. They move schools or switch jobs in order to spice up their life, but my only focus is to piece my life back together, a life I know nothing about. In reality, I'm actually just a newborn expected to act like a teenager, and no one is going to realize that unless I explain to them that, "Hi, I'm Link Jeffreys, I'm seventeen years old, and I have retrograde amnesia, so please don't ask too much of me."

I'm expected to live, too. I can't pull the plug on an existence I've faced for a short while, an existence I haven't tested out yet. This existence is 2D, though. My only option is to take things at face value. People can tell me whatever they want, and I'll believe it, even if it's sabotage, and I would be afraid of that, were it not for the fact that everyone is going to feel too sorry for me to endanger me after what I've been through. I'll be the school's celebrity. Each passing will be accompanied with a soundtrack of whispers. "That's Link. You know, the one with amnesia." Other kids will be known for their killer smile or their likelihood of becoming a billionaire, but I'll forever be known as the kid who crashed into a pole while driving drunk and ended up not remembering jack shit about what people previously thought of me.

I was in the hospital for a while. I missed my last ever homecoming dance. I missed a lot. But this whole grandness of my absence means very little to me. I have no ties to any of it. I can't feel bad about something I am not familiar with. People often say that high school is the best four years of your life, but all I have is the coming seven and a half months. And if I were in some shitty movie, then my story would be about how I learn to accept my condition and make the most out of the time I have left -- but I'm not in some shitty movie, and I'd much rather seek closure in my life than seek a spectacular time.

So I just go back to my supposed home with my supposed father and continue on with my supposed life. I eat a hearty meal of alphabet soup as my parents stare at me the whole time, trying to find something in me that reminds them of the son they raised, not the son they brought back from the hospital. I trace the pictures tacked up upon my bedroom walls, and all they are are portraits of meaningless faces whose grief-tainted personalities are the first impressions I'll receive when I see them again. Can't wait. But they're also portraits of genuine happiness, of appreciation for the bonds I've created with people, of wild times long passed. But this is my new slate. That's the one thing I can remember. I remove every last scrap of evidence to suggest that I existed as anything other than the confused person I am now, and toss it all in the garbage bin.

After I have been cleansed, I draw the curtains that had been previously shut as if I would never return, and I look out into the neighborhood. It's a generic neighborhood. The houses are all roughly the same size, with no houses sticking out from the norm. It has everything in common with any other neighborhood, but what makes any cookie cutter neighborhood so generic is that everyone inside them has love planted in their front yards. Children grow up there. They bike, run, skin their knee, laugh, play, mature. These are all concepts I cannot relate to, so it feels like this stale neighborhood is just that -- stale.

It's a bizarre phenomenon to feel lost wherever you go, but through time I will find myself again -- even if "myself" is something I create along the way.

~~~~~

A/N: I'm starting this rather impulsively

I was in bed at a quarter til midnight, going to bed slightly early for once, when I thought of the first line and I just had to write the first chapter, even though I don't have a mcfrikken outline yet!!! I just made the cover like 5 minutes ago and struggled with finding a name that hasn't already been taken but I got a suitable one

@lana-obama is gonna be so mad that I'm out here posting stories at 1 am

this first chapter doesn't live up to my expectations bc it's choppy and not nearly pretentious enough but it'll have to do

but yeah I hope u enjoy and if u do, please vote and comment bc i love comments so much lmfao

~Dakota