Photographs

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. 

I feel…heavy. My limbs feel leaden, and my senses feel dull, sluggish. With bleary eyes, I scan the room for something, anything to identify where I am. It’s a bedroom, one I don’t recognize. It’s neatly organized, almost cozy. I look over at the mahogany dresser across from me and the assortment of items on top of it - brushes, toiletries, pictures, jewelry, all sitting neatly in their proper place, arranged carefully by their owner. The bed underneath me creaks and groans as I slowly sit up. My legs are unsteady, but I quickly find my footing enough to walk towards the dresser.

I trace my fingers over the grooves in the wood until reaching a small ceramic dish of jewelry. I idly pick through it, skimming through the beaded bracelets, a tangle of chains from various necklaces, and a pair of pearl earrings, until something catches my eye. At the very bottom, buried under the other pieces, sits a ring. The silver band is covered in scratches and the stone is missing, but it’s unmistakably a wedding ring. Picking it up gingerly, I turn it over. I get the sense that I’ve seen it before somewhere.  I briefly picture myself wearing it, but the image is hazy, distant. My eyes flit from the ring, to my fingers, then back to the ring. It looks familiar, feels familiar in a way I can’t quite place.

Before I get a chance to try it on, the door behind me opens. A man stands in the doorway. He looks at me, a smile spread across his face. I’ve seen him somewhere before, but the memory of exactly where eludes me. 

“Sweetheart, you should be in bed, what are you doing up?”

He quickly walks toward me to usher me back to the bed, his hand on the small of my back. I let him guide me back into bed and place the covers over my lap. He sits next to me in bed, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. He smells like aftershave and clean linens. 

“I don't…where am I?” I ask, my voice scratchy from disuse. 

He pauses, a heavy silence settling between us before he breaks it with a heavy sigh.

“You were in a car accident. It was just…awful. When the car flipped, you were pinned, and you–”

He chokes up as he speaks. 

“You were lucky to survive. But that doesn’t matter now. You’re here, and I’m here, and that is what matters. Now, I know you’ve been through a lot, so you might not remember much right now, but that’s okay. It’ll all come back eventually. You just have to be patient and trust me. We can go back to normal. Together.”

You were in a car accident. 

The words replay over and over. 

You were in a car accident.

He places his hand on my cheek, turning me to face him. 

“Don’t worry. We’ll get through this, I promise.”

His voice is soothing, almost comforting. I find myself wanting to sink into it. He lays his head on mine and presses a kiss to my temple. After another moment of silence, he pulls away. 

“Do you at least remember my name?” he asks, looking at me expectantly. 

“... Nathaniel. Your name is Nathaniel. You’re my husband.” 

The words leave my mouth faster than I can process, with a startling level of speed and certainty that I didn’t have before. He sighs with relief and smiles, taking my hand in his and squeezing tightly. 

“And your name is?” he prompts. 

“Amelia.” I finish, once again answering quickly.

When I do, he pulls me into a hug, crushing me to his chest and holding me there. His embrace fills me with a cold, creeping dread despite its warmth. I stiffly wrap my arms around him anyway, trying to mirror him. Whether he notices my hesitation, I can’t tell. After a little while, he releases me and stands, making his way to the door. 

“I’m gonna head back downstairs, and whenever you’re ready, we can walk through memory lane together, bit by bit. I’ll make us dinner later, and we can pick up where we left off, okay?”

He leaves, the door softly clicking shut behind him. In his absence, the room feels colder, quieter. The walls of the room feel too close. The stillness of the air is almost oppressive, killing any of the cozy quaintness it had before. There’s a pervading sense of discomfort, a foreignness that I can’t pinpoint or explain. I want to believe Nathaniel. He seems so sure, so certain. His reassurance echoes in my mind. 

We can go back to normal. 

We’ll get through this.

You just have to trust me. 

Maybe he’s right, and I do have to just trust him. Maybe he can calm the disquiet I feel in the pit of my stomach. Nervously, I rise from the bed and head for the door, my hands shaking as I twist the doorknob. The walls of the hallway are covered in paintings and posters, all of them just as unfamiliar as the bedroom I awoke in. I try and fail to imagine picking them out with Nathaniel at a furniture store, arguing over matters of taste and color palette. Part of me long ago must’ve had some investment, some feeling towards the furnishings, but that part of me is buried somewhere. 

At the end of the hall, just above the stairs, I come to a mirror and look at myself for the first time. The sight of my reflection unsettles me. I expect to see bruises or the faint lines of healed stitches from the car accident, but instead a smooth, unmarred face stares back at me. My skin is perfect, almost eerily so. Shouldn’t there be bruises? Or marks? The sense of dread rises in my chest once again, but I swallow it down. 

You’ll get through it. 

You just have to trust him.

When I get to the bottom, I find Nathaniel in the living room (our living room) setting cardboard boxes on the coffee table. He sits down on the couch, and pats the space next to him. Without thinking, I follow suit. 

“Look, I grabbed some of the boxes with our old pictures in ‘em from the attic. I figured it could help you jog your memory a little, yeah?”

Before I can speak, he grabs an open box and sets it on my lap, the weight of it keeping me in place next to him. I pick up the photo at the top of the pile. It’s a photo of us, together, or at least a couple I assume to be us. 

“That was from our last anniversary trip,” he taps the picture. “We went to Paris, remember? We actually got lost, and god, you were so mad! But, it led us to the cutest little café that we ducked into.”

“Yeah, I remember that place,” I lie, not knowing what to say otherwise. “It was nice.”

He eagerly sets more photos on the table, reminiscing about their subjects as he does. Moments of happiness I don’t recall being part of, pictures of scenic vistas I don’t remember seeing, and gatherings of myself and supposed loved ones that look like little more than strangers are shown to me one by one. The warmth and nostalgia I should feel is replaced by a cold, creeping emptiness. I don’t remember any of it. He turns toward me, and I can tell he expects me to react somehow. I force myself to smile back at him. As his gaze lingers, his own smile briefly begins to falter. Despite his efforts to hide it, I can tell that I did something wrong, though I’m not sure what. He sets the picture down on the table and abruptly stands up from the couch. 

“Hey, how about I make us dinner. I’ll make one of your favorites - how does baked salmon sound?”

“That…sounds nice, thank you.” I say absently. 

He leans down to kiss my forehead before leaving me alone with my thoughts, just as scattered as the photos on the table, fragments of a life I can’t remember fitting into. I tear through each box and pore over every photo, desperate to find something familiar to ignite a spark of recognition, but it never comes.  It only deepens the steadily growing pit in my stomach. The Amelia in the photos is alien to me. Her eyes are different, brighter than the empty ones I saw in my reflection upstairs. Her smiles are crooked but genuine. I try to mimic her smile and even without seeing myself, I know that it pales in comparison to hers. I keep skimming through the photos and in each one she looks alive, and real, and whole in a way that I can’t help but envy. The longer I look, the more uncanny the images of my happy doppelgänger become. 

When I finish with the opened boxes, I look around the room for more and find one that stands out from the rest. A shoebox, sloppily duct-taped shut and left unlabeled, unlike the other boxes of pictures. I hesitate as I dig my fingers under the tape. Something deep down tells me to leave whatever was sealed away underneath the tape exactly how I found it, and wait for Nathaniel to come back. But I can’t shake the burning need to find something, anything to connect me to the disparate details of my life. Carefully and quietly, I pry the tape from around the box until I can take the lid off. Instead of more photos, there are various documents. The first one looks to be a receipt for a clinic or facility of some kind. Amidst the clinical, sterile font on the page, I see it - my name printed there. I keep reading, my confusion and fear growing as I make my way down the page.

Synthetic recreation service?

I flip to the next page, and it’s filled with legal jargon in the same clinical font as the previous page. I flip through the papers until coming to an official looking medical document. A death certificate. My death certificate. The words become a blur as my head starts to spin. 

Deceased: Amelia Burke

Cause of Death: Accidental

My stomach turns and my chest feels tight. The papers fall from my hands, fluttering to the ground. The sickening picture starts to click into place. The reason I can’t remember anything, the wrongness I feel, the discrepancies in the photos - it all makes sense now. The truth settles in around me like a blanket, heavy and suffocating. None of this is real. I’m not real. In my panic, I don’t hear Nathaniel’s footsteps as he walks back into the living room. 

“How goes the walk down memory lane, sweetheart? Find anything?”

When he lays eyes on the box, and my expression, the smile on his face falls. 

“Oh,” he says flatly. “I didn’t mean to bring that one down from the attic. But you shouldn’t worry about that one, it’s just–”

I don’t let him finish. 

“What am I?” I ask, pushing the box towards him. 

He stares back at me blankly, frozen. 

“What am I? Who am I?” 

“You–” he trembles, eyes growing wet with tears as he speaks.  “You’re my wife. Isn’t that all that matters?”

He lowers himself down to the sofa, arms outstretched toward me. 

“You were dead, honey. But you’re back, now.” His voice softens as he tries to comfort me. “We can be together again, just like before. Don’t you want that for us? A fresh start? You just have to trust me, and we can make things right again.”

As he goes to wrap his arms around me, I jerk backwards. This isn’t right, this is wrong, all of it is wrong. Fear, and then anger, flickers in his eyes the more I pull away from him. 

“Honey. You’re making this harder than it needs to be. If you’d just listen to me, we could work together on this!” 

He strides forward and closes the gap between us, caging me between his arms and the couch. I push him away, but it doesn't deter him. He continues his efforts to soothe me as I kick at him wildly, fighting to get away from him. My foot connects with his face, briefly knocking him back. His eyes darken as he shoves me into the couch, pinning me by my throat. 

“Why can’t you just let me do this for us?” his grip on my throat tightens, and he sounds more crazed by the second. “It was supposed to be different this time! Why do you have to keep fighting me on this?”

I claw at his face and arms, but he doesn’t let up. I gaze up at him through the growing dark spots in my vision. Tears stream down his face as he continues to plead with me to let him fix this, to let him fix me. It’s the last thing I hear before everything goes black. 

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here.