Connection

It is a disconcerting feeling that weighs upon your mind no matter how many times the specialists say you are better off not thinking about it. Again and again the doctors tell me to focus on the present and to let my mind have the time it needs to properly heal. Still, mother's gentle reminders and father's soft scoldings are not enough to enforce the well-meant medical advice.

Perhaps they would have had a chance at reaching me if they truly understood what it felt like to be in my shoes. Maybe then their searching hands could have found the daughter in their memories to drag her free from wherever she had been forced to stay. But the truth of the matter is that neither of my loving parents have lived in such a reality as mine. They have never been forced to walk along such a fragmented path.

I pray that they will never have to.

Despite the conflicting feelings of guilt for not being the person they know and resentment towards them for making me feel like a failure at their every fruitless attempt, I do not blame them for trying. I do not hate them for their freely given comfort and encouragement. It is not their fault for not knowing. It is not their fault they are unable to understand.

Truly, no one in my memory since waking with only the sensations of cold and fear familiar in an otherwise unfamiliar world has been able to understand me. No one really grasps exactly what it is like living a life that you feel is not truly your own. They cannot even begin to comprehend what it was like coming to realize the face in the mirror was your own, and that face was not someone you recognized. That face was a stranger who lived twenty years into an unknown future. My future. One I have no memory of.

The doctors said it was an accident. They said that head wounds are tricky. They said what I am experiencing is a rare outcome to serious bain trauma, but they have every hope I will one day recover what has been lost. And though my parents nod along and hold strongly to such a claim, I have found myself doubting over the months stuck living in this half life.

A full recovery is what they pray for. But how? How is it possible to hope for such an outcome? How does one gain back twenty years of lost life? Of lost memory?

I do not have the answer. I do not have hope for the woman my parents search for when they meet my gaze. Instead, I hold fear and apprehension for that person in the mirror who is nothing but a premonition of a possible path in life. She is nothing more than a version of me I both fear and hope I will never come to be.

That stranger in the mirror is twenty years ahead at thirty-seven with a head for business, eye for detail, and a perfect smile for frenzied clients. She lives with three cats, always chooses extra hours of work over an evening with friends, and has no desire to travel outside of business trips. She is who I am, but I am not who she is.

I am not that bitter woman who turns away every chance at love because it is seen as an inconvenience to a successful future. That materialistic stranger who ignores calls and messages from friends in order to further her career is not me. How can I be the woman who refuses to have, adopt, or foster children because they are seen as a hindrance rather than a blessing? When children are all I have ever wanted in life.

It should be impossible for the me I know to be this person, but somehow I am her. I am a seventeen years young girl who plays at being a grown woman, but I am also a grown woman of thirty-seven years who no longer plays at anything. We are one in body and name, but we are not the same. Truly, I have never felt so seperate from another human being before. So entirely disconnected from another life.

It is that sense of disconnection that pushes me to try and find those lost years. Perhaps that drive and perseverence I feel flaring to life to reflect in my dogged attempts at pulling memories to the surface are what has carried that unreachable woman in the mirror into her own successful life. A life that I cannot fathom as being one I built myself.

Somewhere in my mind, lost by head trauma and waiting to be found, are the answers I seek. I need to know what happened to build this untouchable woman. There has to be a reason for once dreaming eyes to turn so cold and calculating. There has to be something. There needs to be an answer.

So, despite attempts at scolding and dettering me, I relentlessly hunt for something that will trigger a lost memory. I search and I search, but there is nothing within a spotless home to guide me to this unknown woman who carries my name but not my heart.

There are no pictures of places visited, outings with friends, or captured moments of life to adorn that woman's home. Carefully decorated shelves and a meticulousy organized desk do not offer any albums or keepsakes to speak of a connection outside of work.

And so, disappointed yet still determined, I continue to hunt. From one room to the next I move along to find out why this stranger woke with no one but her parents to visit her in a bare hospital room with not even a single flower to offer comfort.

But there are no answers to be found in a lifeless home. There are no memories proudly displayed with beaming smiles, or hidden photographs to speak of secret desires or heavy regrets. Within this stranger's own home there is nothing to tell the story of her journey. Nothing exists to show who the woman behind a thriving business is.

And though I am the one without twenty years of memory, I cannot help but to convince myself the more I dig into this stranger's life that it is not me who is out of place in the world. I do not believe the me with twenty years of misplaced memories is the one who is lost.

That stranger in the mirror is the one who is disconnected. She is the one who is out of touch with her own life. It is she, not I, who is living only half a life. One that is void of true memory.

I may have forgotten twenty years of life, but she is the one who forgot to live. I only lost memories, but that stranger lost everything else. She lost her connection to life. Misplaced her bonds to friends who didn't walk away but were brushed aside to be forgotten. That woman, that successful stranger with expensive clothes in her closet but not a place to wear that two-thousand dollar dress to, she is lost.

She is gone from my memory, and no one exists in the world she built around herself to remind me of who she truly was. She is gone, but I am here. And perhaps, just maybe, it is better this way. To have a second chance to build a life of bonds rather than transactions.

I do not know if the memories will ever return, but I am starting to see that I will be fine if they do not. Because now is the time to make new memories within a new life. Now, with a true separation drawn between that stranger and myself, is my chance to walk a different path. A path built big enough for others to walk it alongside of me.

Unlike the me I will never be again, I choose life.

I choose true connection.