I didn't pull my hand away.
Not immediately.
Because my body remembered how this scene was supposed to go. Boyfriend reassures girlfriend. A small smile. Soft words. A continuity of performance that would move them both onward past the pain of the rift. There was a script there, but the emotions weren't.
She touched the back of my hand on her thumb and did a slow circle. It was something she'd done over and over that she was probably unaware of doing, a tiny comfort ritual familiar to Elvio, but completely foreign to me.
"Elvio," she said again, softer. "You're scaring me a little."
I blinked, focusing on her face. I catalogued it as I had done with all things when I woke up in this life: with concern and attachment and history.
It was all directed at a version of me that no longer existed; like mail sent to a wrong address.
"I am just tired," I told her.
Lie.
Truth.
Both.
She studied me with a particular intensity as if looking for a known face, but a face which had been altered.
"You've been somewhere else lately," she murmured.
I almost answered:
Yes. A different life.
Instead, I asked, "Do you ever feel like," I said, carefully selecting each word like you have to pick a footing when you wriggle uncertainly, "someone changed while keeping the same face?"
She gave a little, a sad smile. "You mean growing up?"
"No," I said quietly. "I mean… replaced."
Silence settled between us for a while.
She picked up her cup, turned it slowly in her hands, then set it back down.
"That's not funny."
"I wasn't joking."
She crossed her arms over her back and leaned back. "You're talking like you don't belong here."
The declaration came crashing down in such an accurate fashion that it was difficult to breathe.
I didn't respond. It wasn't that I couldn't but because if I opened my mouth, I wasn't sure what would come out.
_ _ _
The stillness came and the sounds of the café filled the place – cups touching saucers, low chatter and the hiss of the espresso machine adding intermittent breaks to the silence. Every waking moment is unbearably normal.
I felt as though I had accessed another account and was trying to use a set-up that was someone else's.
She exhaled slowly.
"Did I do something? she asked."
There it was. The belief that distance is a fault of her own that if something broke, then it must have been held improperly—by her. I did expect to hear some irritation when it was asked of me. Rather, I sensed a deep, seething pain move through me: a quiet, aching sadness.
Not love. But sorrow.
The kind that descends from witnessing someone grip onto something that's already dropped.
"You didn't," I said.
"Then what changed?"
Everything. Nothing. Death. A transfer I didn't agree with. A conversion of a vacancy to an occupancy. I saw her hands lying on the table. The silver ring, barely a filet on her right hand, caught the light.
I did remember the memories that came with that ring. A park. Afternoon light. Afterwards she could have repeated to her friends what Elvio said, as she had loved the way it sounded to her, pressing the ring into her hand and laughing while she said it. I could recall the details like reading a diary entry.
But the emotion attached to that memory?
Zero.
It's like having to read a love letter and figure out all the words while not feeling a bit of it.
I looked up.
I realized then, with terrifying clarity.
Memories are information.
"I remember everything," I said slowly. "But it doesn't feel like mine."
Her expression faltered.
"That doesn't make sense."
"I know."
She shook her head, frustrated. "You're talking like you're outside your own life."
Maybe I am.
—
Afterwards, I walked her home.
Not for love or affection, but because a moment of hushed expectation has slipped into this routine, in this unspoken contract, the terms of which I had been given, had been made for me, made over me.
She was talking about minor details. A class assignment. Something about the downstairs neighbor. A show that she had been watching. I spoke where it was proper to speak, I laughed when I was supposed to laugh, made some sound of presence where necessary, and thought something else altogether.
She didn't seem to notice. Or she always noticed and decided not to mention its name.
I walked but inside, my thoughts spiraled.
If love could disappear while memory stayed,
then what exactly was love?
And how come the girl under the streetlight from my dreams feels heavier in my chest than the person walking beside me now?
We stopped outside her building.
She looked around to meet my gaze.
"You don't look at me the same," she said quietly.
I didn't deny it. It hurt her worse than a lie would have, and I knew that as I refused to fix it.
"Did you meet someone?" she asked.
In my mind, I didn't think about the park. The streetlight. The silence of an unknown girl from my dreams that my body remembered in a strange way.
"I don't know," I said.
She quickly shut her eyes to something she did not want to look at.
"That's worse."
Yes. It was.
_ _ _
That night, I couldn't sleep.
The fan above me spun endlessly, its low hum filling the dark.
I sat up and reached for the notebook in my drawer.
I don't remember when it started to look like mine . What happened was the shift occurred between picking it up and when you opened it because you'd feel the weight before you'd know what was in it.
Not particularly remarkable, it was in the drawer next to my bed. Dark cover with college ruled paper. I cannot find it in my memory that I bought it. Nor do I recall having any memory of writing entries in it.
I opened the first filled page. Again the same feeling.
The handwriting was mine, but the tone wasn't.
> Day 3: "Memory is not proof of self. Emotional continuity is.
My stomach dropped.
I turned the page in confusion.
> "I remember her smile, but not why it mattered. That means it didn't belong to me."
Another page.
> "If I feel grief without history, then history existed without memory."
My hands began to shake. Not in a violent way but with a fine tremor of one that shall come from the shifting of architecture or from a re-evaluation of self. I flipped further. Observations, questions which I have been meaning to ask for days, written out, written to. They had practically been there before I could phrase them.
Then one line came to an end and made all stops.
> "I think I crossed."
The room seemed to be void of air.
Crossed. As the stranger said. I kept reading.
> "If this notebook makes sense to you, then you're not the first version in this body."
I felt a coldness enter me slowly and fully.
Not the first.
I read it over again, I had to be sure that I understood it.
Versions.
Like updates.
Like occupants.
My eyes moved to the bottom of the page.
> "Don't panic. Panic wastes time."
Too late.
_ _ _
I placed the notebook on the bed and raised my body. Strode up to the mirror and switched on the light.
Same face. Same eyes. Same body. A surface that has not been modified in any way.
On the other hand, however, I now knew of something that the surface can never hold: that my thoughts were there before I knew they existed.
Within this body had been someone who already knew of the fracture, who already asked the questions, had already written them, the quiet specificity of a rude man who writes field notes while inside an ongoing catastrophe.
Which implied,
either I had forgotten that I wrote it…
or someone else had written through me.
I touched my chest. The pain throbbed: it was constant and never-ending. Not pain, exactly. Actually, more like insistence. From a portion of a part that will not go away.
Then came another fear, surfaced.
What if the reason I didn't feel love for the girl I was supposed to,
was because the love I carried belonged somewhere else?
Somewhere I hadn't remembered yet.
I returned to the Notebook.
One more page remained unread.
The handwriting here was more hasty and handwritten, although the letters are slightly uneven, the hand off the page was different than the rest.
> "When you meet her, the pain will sharpen.
That's how you'll know."
I began to gasp.
Meet her.
Pain will sharpen.
I thought of the woman from my dream. Rain. The streetlight. The moment my chest aligned and hurt at the same time.
My hands trembled.
I flipped the notebook closed.
Because I already knew,
I had met her.
And whatever I had crossed into this life for,
had just begun waking up.
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