Weekly Writing – July 6 2024

It’ll be temporary, they all told him, like a comfort. Or a deadline – a demand that he should be himself again, the him they remembered, before his dazed, unfamiliar wandering around his own home could prove their predictions wrong.
The memories would all come back, they assured him. It was just a wound, and wounds were made to heal.
But it had been six months, and their predictions were starting to come due. Six months, and he still walked through his house – apparently, his house – like someone new who had moved in there. He still wondered why he – apparently, he – would have bought certain things, why he had such bleak taste in books, what he meant by keeping certain pills in the nightstand.
He had spent six months piecing together a life that was supposedly his like archaeology, and making memories. New ones, deciding where he stood in relation to the artifacts around him. The suits he found restrictive and the mug from the university he didn’t remember attending. If he didn’t agree with some of the decisions he had apparently made, and if the memories did come back, then who would win out? Who got to be right about who they were, what they liked, the friends they kept and the calls they let ring through?
He had cleared the pills out of the nightstand. Stopped answering calls from the people who sounded most impatient for him to remember. Maybe changing the space, being the one to shape it, would give him an edge if it came down to fighting for who was right.
And if it didn’t come down to a fight, if he disappeared like a wound, fell off like a scab, he could at least leave the apparently-him who had killed him to wander an unfamiliar home and be forced to wonder about the person who had lived there, too.