Remember Me

“Here you are,” a nurse said while setting a silver tray down on a white table.

It was the same thing that the nurse brought me twenty minutes ago. A banana pudding cup.

Or at least, I thought it was banana; there was only a very slight hint of it. So it could still be vanilla.

“ Can you pass me my clipboard?” I said.

The nurse gave a bright “of course!” before walking to the brown, wooden counter on the wall at the other side of the room. It was also the source of a smell that took up the whole room, hand sanitizer, and plastic.

The clicks and scrapes of the nurse’s shoes seemed to echo through the room as she walked up to the pudding cup to put down the clipboard next to it, before heading out the door. But on her way out, she said:

“ Your visitor should be here any minute.”

I voluntarily opened and closed my eyes in hopes that it would clear my vision of the bright, stark lights that illuminated the room. Then, when they were cleared, I looked at the clipboard for the third time today. I remembered everything that the clipboard said, and…that’s it.

That’s all that I remembered about myself and my whole life.

My name was Mneme Washington. I was twenty-three years old. My address was in Cleveland, Ohio.

I had a severe TBI that resulted from a car accident that I got in with my friends, but wasn’t majorly wounded otherwise, besides a few scratches.

It didn’t say anything about my visitor, but my boyfriend was my only known contact as of now.

I put down the clipboard and stared at the turned-off flat screen TV that was on the wall in front of me, towering over me from the white ceiling.

Then I closed my eyes and thought long and hard about any accidents, anything before waking up here.

But…nothing. Absolutely nothing.

What terrible luck.

I heard footsteps approaching my room. After I straightened up in my bed, I saw the nurse and a young man around my age walk up to the open doorway.

“ Your visitor is here,” the nurse said, only trying to peek her head given the doorway.

“ Hi,” the man said meekly, awkwardly raising his hand up.

“ I’ll leave you two alone to talk,” the nurse said, then smiled with her red lipstick on her teeth, “ Let me know if you need anything!”

She walked off, and the man slowly walked into the room and whispered to himself, “ I can’t believe it.”

I noticed that once he walked into the room, he had flowers. White and yellow daisies.

I raised an eyebrow, “ Do…I know you?”

He snorted out a laugh, showing all of his teeth, which he tries to cover with his hand, “ Is that supposed to be a joke?”

I shook my head slowly.

He showed her the flowers, “ I’m your boyfriend. It should say so on the clipboard.”

“ Well…” I looked him up and down, “ I guess that makes sense. Since you’re my only contact.”

“ Exactly! Is it okay if I hug you?” He said.

I said yes, and he walked up to my bed to hug me. As he did, I noticed that he smelled like roses and chemicals. As if he dipped his hands in Lysol.

I also felt a whiff from him through my hair.

When he let me go, he exasperated, “ I’m so happy to see you again.”

“ What’s your name?” I asked.

He laughed, then put the flowers on the table on the other side of the room.

“ It’s crazy to me that you have to ask me that.” He said, shaking his head. “ It’s Damien.”

I looked him up and down again. At his short, brown curls and brown eyes through thick glasses. He had a lanky figure, which wasn’t necessarily my type, but maybe I made an exception for him.

But of course, I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“ Well, I feel lucky to have a guy like you, Damien.” I smiled.

He looked back at me with a smile and attentive eyes, “ I feel so much luckier to have a girl like you, Mneme. I truly mean that.”

He grabbed my hand and clasped it in his, “ And no matter what, even if you don’t remember me. I’ll make sure that we make more memories together, just like we did before. We gotta make up for lost time, right?”

“ Right…” I said. “ You’re so sweet.”

He giggled, “ Yeah, I’ve been told that.”

Something is off about him…I thought to myself, I can’t figure out what. I wish I just had my memories.

Who knew that remembering the past was so…integral to who I was. I felt like I didn’t really exist without them, like I was some sort of wandering ghost that got stuck in the real world.

I wish I could remember Damien, he seemed like a sweet guy, but I don’t have any of the feelings or emotions that he had, and it felt so…strange to me.

“ How did we meet?”

Damien’s face lit up. “ We met in high school. We shared a math class and became study partners over a group project. We said we liked each other at some point, and then I asked you to prom.“

He went into his pocket, “ I actually have a picture of us at prom.”

He took out his phone and showed me a picture of both of us smiling behind a glittery blue background. With me in a pink dress with my dark, straight hair braided with flowers, and him in a black tuxedo with a matching flower in his breast pocket.

“ Ever since then, I never stopped thinking about you.” He said.

As cute as the picture was, it made me realize something.

“ Wait, where’s my phone? It should have pictures of us on there, right? Or of my family?”

Damien’s smile slightly wavered, and he lowered his phone slightly.

“ The nurse says that you can’t have it yet.”

I raised a brow, “ Really? I’m going to ask her- cuz if I’m allowed to have visitors I should be able to use my phone-”

“ She’s busy right now,” Damien said, looking straight at me with a deadpan face.

I lowered myself back into my bed, “....okay. Maybe we could look at more pictures on your phone, then?”

He made a face that showed all of his teeth. Which were only slightly yellow.

“ That’s…gonna be difficult to do. Because I kind of…deleted all our photos.”

“ What? Why would you do that?” I exclaimed.

Damien looked down and scratched the back of his head.

“ Well… why do you think?” He laughed nervously. “ We…I…didn’t think you were gonna survive the accident. Mneme- it was so hard for me. I- I was so overtaken by grief that I deleted everything. Looking at your face at the time was too much.”

I looked down, “ Oh, I see…”

I felt the bandages on my head, feeling the roughness of the material, and how tight each band was around me.

“ It must’ve been really hard for you,” I mused.

Damien nodded, taking a seat in a nearby chair, “ It was.”

Ugh, I didn’t know if I was ever good with this kind of thing, but I knew I wasn’t now. I couldn’t handle causing this much stress for someone else.

Besides, things…still felt..off. In the way that he talked to me. In the way he said nice things to me. I didn’t know why, but it felt…strange.

“ So…what did I like to do?” I cleared my throat.

“ Oh, you loved to paint,” Damien started, completely dropping the stressed look he had earlier. “ You always spent extra time after all your art classes during school, and you had paintings all over the wall where you used to live.”

“ Where do I live now?” I asked.

“ Well, with me, of course,” Damien laughed, “ We have an apartment together. Not too far from here, actually.”

“ Oh…well, that’s nice,” I said. “ Do we like the same food?”

But Damien didn’t answer.

Instead, he stared at the doorway with a blank stare. Like a cat staring at the bird that it was going to catch. After a while, he looked at me and said,

“ You wanna get out of here?”

“ What?”

“ Do you wanna get out of here?” Damien said. “ Leave the hospital?”

“ What the-” I looked in the doorway, then whispered, “ Why the hell would we do that?”

“ C’mon, Mimi- the insurance? If you stay, they’re gonna make you stay much longer than you need to and then bill you thousands. And to tell you what? That you hit your head and have amnesia?” Damien scoffed, “ I think we have that much figured out.”

“Plus, I don’t think this hospital is under our insurance.” Damien continued, “ We should get you to a hospital that we can afford, not this place.”

“ But we can’t just leave,” I shook my head, “ Don’t we need to get discharged- isn’t there something in the law-”

“ Be honest with me, Mneme, do you really want to wait for that, for who knows how long? It might be weeks before you get to leave. ”

“ Wha- what about my family? Are they okay with this- where are they?”

“ You don’t talk to them, you haven’t spoken to any of them since you went to college- I’ll explain later- but we got to go now- before the nurses come back-”

“ You want to sneak out?” I whispered harshly.

“ Yes- but we gotta go now before it’s too late, “ Damien said as he got up from his chair and walked toward her bed.

“ This doesn’t make any sense- I want to talk to the nurse who was taking care of me- I want her to confirm what you said-”

“ We don’t have time,” Damien said, unplugging all the machines in the room, everything that was attached to the tubes that were taped on my arm.

“ Stop! I’m not going to leave-”

“ Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step away from her!”

Damien and I both looked in the doorway, and suddenly a bunch of people were standing there.

My nurse, a group of people who looked identical to me, and the police.

Later that night, Damien Ross was removed and banned from entering the hospital.

When I woke up on the news, I saw that he was also arrested for attempted kidnapping. Which was called in by Lucas McBrian, my real boyfriend, of breaking into their house in Cleveland last night while carrying a weapon, and stealing pictures of Lucas and me.

My family had appeared at the hospital to visit exactly ten minutes after Damien visited me. And by the description of Damien, he was confirmed to be one of the two drivers who were there on the night of my accident.

To my morbid amusement, it turned out that Damien was someone who I should’ve remembered.