Forget My Name - J.S. Monroe

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My bed is comfortable – white sheets that feel like expensive Egyptian cotton – and Laura has put a handful of freshly picked wild flowers in a miniature milk bottle on my painted bedside cupboard. The kindness of strangers. The room itself is just as I described it to Laura and Tony earlier. Perfect for a child, although the colours may be a bit muted.

            Starting with my arrival at the airport, I begin to write down everything that I did: trying to report my lost handbag, travelling here by train, meeting Laura and Tony, visiting the surgery, going to the pub quiz tonight. I don’t record anything personal about anyone, as I already feel like public property and have no doubt that whatever I write down will be read by others – doctors, police, mental-health staff. They all mean well, I’m sure, but I need to be careful. At the top of the paper I write: ‘read this when you wake up.’

            Laura is still downstairs. She’s behaving so strangely towards me. One moment wary, the next warm and tactile. We both saw the reaction of Dr Patterson at the end of our meeting at the surgery. Her shock was too obvious to miss. Just like Laura’s when she received the text at dinner. It was nothing about yoga. Who the hell is Jemma Huish?

            I haven’t heard Tony come back from the pub yet. He told me to leave the key under the flowerpot outside the front door. I was tempted to stay, just to see if his singing was as bad as Laura says, but I felt too tired.

            I am desperate for sleep now, but I’m anxious about what the morning might bring. Can it be any worse, more stressful than today? I have to keep going but feel at the mercy of others, the medical profession, my own memory. Images of Fleur continue to come and go. The moment I see her, she’s gone again.

            If I close my eyes now, I can bring her up from the darkness. Here she is, sitting in bed in her apartment, her face obscured by the book she’s reading: another account of Berlin’s underground techno scene. ‘Fleur,’ I whisper, my eyes watering. She lowers the book and I gasp out loud. Her face is locked in a wide-mouthed scream.

            The brain is a frightening thing, capable of remembering so much of what we want it to forget and forgetting the one thing that we most want it to remember. And then, years later, it chooses to work, operating like an autonomous neural state, summoning a nightmare from beyond the city walls, the badlands of amnesia.