The Clean Slate

The night Sal signed the waiver, the air inside the clinic was cold and sterile, humming faintly with fluorescent lights. There was no ceremony, no dramatic flourish. Just a clipboard, a signature, and a nod from the tech in the gray scrubs. It felt too easy, given what he was about to do.

He sat in the waiting room for twenty minutes after that, the waiver still clutched in his hand like a confession. No one else was there. Just him and a looping video on the wall about the future of memory engineering. "Imagine a life unburdened," the narrator said, "a life where the past doesn’t hurt you anymore."

Sal laughed under his breath. If only it worked that way.

He was here to forget Courtney.

More specifically, to erase her.

The relationship had ended nearly a year ago. No betrayal. No screaming fights. Just the kind of slow, painful decay that made every shared space feel like a graveyard. Courtney had moved out in April. He found one of her earrings behind the couch cushion in July and cried so hard he vomited. The idea of her still haunted every corner of his apartment, every sound, every scent. He had tried everything — therapy, travel, even dating again. Nothing worked.

So he found MemoryLight.

They’d been around for a couple years. Controversial. Cutting edge. Legal in six states. He moved to Oregon just to do it. They didn’t erase whole timelines — only isolated threads. A specific person. A particular trauma. A night you wish you’d never lived. The technology was supposedly safe. The government had its doubts, but it didn’t stop people from lining up. There was always a price tag for forgetting, and he had paid it in full.

A buzzer sounded. The tech called his name.

Inside the procedure room, the chair looked like a dentist's recliner, but surrounded by machines shaped like minimalist sculptures. There was no smell, no warmth, no noise beyond the buzz of anticipation and nerves in his own body.

"You understand the process?" the tech asked.

"I understand enough."

"Once it’s done, it can’t be undone. Not ever. Your memories of Courtney, and everything directly linked to her, will be gone. That includes conversations, shared events, locations, habits formed together, even emotional associations."

Sal nodded.

"You’ll lose the pain," the tech said, softer now, "but you’ll also lose the meaning."

Sal looked up at the lights. "That’s the point."

They began the procedure.

He woke up in a recovery room. A nurse gave him water, smiled, said everything went smoothly. No disorientation. No pain. He was free to go.

Sal walked back to his apartment, which felt slightly unfamiliar, though not disturbingly so. A few photographs were missing. Some furniture had been rearranged. He assumed this was part of the protocol — removing any objects that might re-trigger the memory. It all seemed neutral. Normal.

He made coffee. Opened a book. Listened to some music. The silence was… quiet. Not screaming at him anymore.

He slept deeply that night for the first time in months.

The next few days felt like freedom. He went on walks without the aching compulsion to text someone. He cooked dinner and didn’t feel the hollow ache of a second plate. When someone mentioned a name — Courtney — in passing at the grocery store, it passed through him like any other syllable. Meaningless. Empty.

It worked.

He was clean.

It wasn’t until a week later that the first crack formed.

Sal was talking to a coworker about movies. Someone mentioned Before Sunrise. Everyone nodded. Sal laughed. "God, I remember watching that on a rooftop with someone…" He paused. His voice thinned. "I… think?"

He couldn’t finish the sentence.

It wasn't a big moment. Just confusion. But it left a splinter in his brain.

He went home that night and stared at the blank spot on his bookshelf. The space was too large. Like something had been removed. Not just an object. A piece of him.

More gaps emerged.

One afternoon he saw a couple holding hands in the park and felt his stomach twist. Not jealousy. Not longing. Just pain — abstract and detached — as though his body remembered something he no longer did.

Soon, the gaps began to grow teeth.

He found himself doing strange things. Avoiding certain streets for reasons he couldn't explain. Ordering food he hated, then realizing he always ordered it anyway. Music made him cry for no reason. He caught himself humming lullabies he didn’t recognize.

He called MemoryLight. They said the feelings were "phantom echoes" — a known phenomenon. The mind sometimes retained the emotional residue of erased experiences. It would fade in time.

It didn’t.

Sal started dreaming of a woman with dark eyes and laughter like water. He didn’t know her name. In the dream, they sat on a fire escape and talked about stars. Her fingers traced circles on his wrist. She told him something — something vital — but every time he woke up, it was gone.

He started searching. Through his apartment. His old journals. Emails. Social media. Nothing. All mentions of Courtney had been scrubbed as part of the process. She had been surgically excised from his life.

He was a man missing a ghost limb.

Friends noticed the change. He was quieter. Disconnected. At parties, he’d stare too long at nothing. When someone hugged him, he sometimes flinched.

The truth hit hardest one night when he passed a girl outside a bar. She looked up. Her face flickered with recognition. Her mouth opened — about to speak — but then closed. Her eyes welled up.

Sal walked past her, not knowing why his chest hurt like it had cracked in half.

He started dreaming of her more. The woman with the laughter. Now she was crying in the dreams. She stood at the door, asking, “Why did you let them take me?” But no sound came out of her mouth. Only silence. And Sal, always, woke up screaming.

He tried therapy again, but how do you talk about grief when you don’t remember who died?

The therapist said he was experiencing emotional dislocation. "You’ve lost the narrative thread," she said. "Your emotions have nowhere to land. It’s like trying to grieve a ghost you’ve never met."

Sal wanted to die.

Not because he missed her — not exactly. But because he missed the version of himself who loved her. That man was gone. MemoryLight hadn’t just removed Courtney. They had hollowed out the moments that gave him depth, contradiction, humanity.

He was a clean slate. A blank page.

And it felt like hell.

Years passed.

Sal became someone else. Quieter. Hollow-eyed. Detached. People called him kind, but distant. He smiled a lot. He told polite stories. But inside, he felt like a building after a fire — cleaned, repainted, but charred beneath the walls.

He never fell in love again.

Something in him had closed. Locked shut. No key. No map.

One day, while cleaning out old boxes, he found a polaroid. It had somehow survived the purge. A photo of him and a woman. Her head on his shoulder. Both of them laughing like fools.

No name. No date. Just a scrawled caption in handwriting that wasn’t his-

"Don’t forget me, even if you think you want to."

He sat on the floor for hours holding the photo, his hands shaking.

The pain didn’t come as a wave — it came as a dull ache, constant and inescapable. He sat on the floor, staring at the photo until the light in the room began to change. He couldn’t remember her name. He didn’t need to. He already knew. He had made the worst decision of his life. And it would haunt him forever.