That was what Dr. Whitaker had called it.
Maybe temporary.
Maybe permanent.
“Write things down,” she had told me. “Don’t depend on other people to tell you who you are.”
So I did.
Coffee: oat milk, one sugar.
Allergic to penicillin.
Best friend: Megan.
That last entry had a line drawn through it.
No explanation.
Richard had been there almost every day after I woke up.
He was a nurse, which explained why he always seemed to know what I needed.
Once, before I had told him how I took my coffee, he brought me oat milk and one sugar.
“You remembered?” I asked.
“Lucky guess.”
Another time, he carried a vase of lilies out of my hospital room before I could complain about the smell.
“They give a lot of people headaches,” he said.
I accepted that too.
When I was finally discharged, Richard offered me his spare room.
My parents had died when I was nineteen.
I had no close family waiting for me.
And nowhere felt like home.
Somewhere between physical therapy, sleepless nights, and learning how to live around the enormous hole in my memory, I fell in love with Richard.
Two years later, I married him.
But that morning, while we were getting dressed for the wedding, I had asked a question that should have occurred to me much earlier.
“Where are all your friends from before my accident?”
Richard adjusted his cuff.
