Mallory
Reid didn't know me. He couldn't understand the past year of bliss we'd experienced. Memories flashed through my mind of autumn; comforting, warmer yet with Reid by my side. Winter, season of hidden beauty. Spring, a time for renewal and reinvigoration. And summer, which we were only just starting together.
This never existed to Reid. My hands shook in their place, my breath tremoring. I didn't bother moving, as Reid looked on with the same blank politeness on his face. It was just too much. I felt my body capsizing on itself, like a fragile aspen tree in a calm breeze. The plain cream walls of the hospital room looked oddly distorted.
Jada, Reid's mother, had the sense to usher me out of the hospital room, into the hallway outside. "How could this happen?" I asked her. My voice sounded scratchy and distant, even to my ears.
She winced. "The doctors said that Reid has retrograde amnesia. I'm sorry, honey."
I stared at the polished white floor in front of me. Jada shouldn't be sorry, or speak in that worried, careful tone. I should have been taking care of Reid's mother, not the other way around. But my throat tightened around any words of comfort that I could speak into existence.
I glanced up to see Jada's eyes fill with tears. I quickly looked down again at the specks on the floor. It felt like I was intruding on her private grief. I wasn't the only person impacted by Reid's amnesia, but he didn't remember me at all.
I wasn't saying this to discredit anyone's distress over the situation; quite the opposite. I was his best friend and his girlfriend, but our relationship only spanned a year; our friendship, a few months longer. I didn't know Reid as a child. I wasn't his family, so was I allowed to feel the same way about this situation?"
"What was Reid's last memory?" I asked Jada to distract myself.
"It wasn't as recent as we could have hoped, but he remembered starting senior year at high school. Everything after that is clouded."
After speaking, Jada allowed herself a tiny, sorrowed smile. I could see that she was relieved. Terribly sad, but happy that she still had him. I realised that all this time, Jada was preparing for the worst. I still couldn't think about it without my stomach twisting in knots.
"You know, the memory loss is likely temporary. The doctor said so." Jada said. "I'm sure the past few years will come back to him very soon."
"And if it doesn't? If he never remembers me? What will I do then?"
And that was the shattering truth of it, the thing that finally broke my spirit. I didn't want our relationship to remain in stasis, but that was out of my control. Our fates were placed into the hands of a higher power, and my condemnation was as such.
My breathing became erratic, tumbling into shaky gasps for air. I pulled my hands through my hair and closed my eyes, aware that my heart rate was accelerating too quickly, hurting my chest with a ferocity I'd never felt before.
I felt Jada pushing me down onto a seat, telling me to calm down in a panicked voice. But I couldn't. Not with Reid gone. Not when he was taken from me like this.
Eventually, Jada took me to a waiting room so that we could talk to the doctor with Reid's dad. He was just as kind as Jada, but I was numb to it all. Once the doctor started talking, I clung to his words, hoping that he would offer something of help.
"Thankfully, no fuel leaked from the car, so there was no opportunity for burns or more serious consequences." the doctor said. He sounded just as cold as Nina had when she called me, but he was trained to feel neutral towards these kind of situations. He'd watched many people like us come in, scared for their loved ones.
He continued to talk. "Reid sustained a head injury sometime during the accident. Now ordinarily, this would not be a significant cause for concern to his life, but combined with the stress and trauma of the accident, the odds of brain function being impacted increase dramatically. There is also a higher likelihood of any effects' durations increasing. For example, his amnesia's duration will have to be monitored.
The brain is a complex organ that we do not fully understand yet, but we can expect to see changes to Reid in terms of his memory, language, personality, and any other function of the cerebral cortex. The physical trauma to the head is less worrying, but you will need to keep an eye on his mental state for some time. The hospital will assign a psychiatrist if necessary."
After the doctor left, I sat limply in a plastic seat with my hands in my lap. I could only pray that this was a nightmare I would wake up from. The writhing in my stomach crashed into empty space. Only a dull ache was left.
I wanted to throw up. Physical symptoms of shock surfaced; chills hitting me when I was least expecting it, and a persistent headache. This was my own personal hell. Fragments of the night before kept hitting my memory; the bonfire glow, checking my appearance in my bathroom mirror, singing tunelessly because my voice echoed that of a dying sparrow. It was all so trivial.
The sound of the door opening brought me out of my thoughts. Tony entered the waiting room with two cups of hot chocolate. He offered me one of them with a sympathetic, if tentative, smile. "I can't imagine how you're feeling right now."
I said nothing. Tony seemed to know that I didn't want to talk. So we stayed together in silence, sipping our drinks to clear the time.
I always had an overactive imagination. As a kid, my nightmares felt so real that I had to force myself awake to escape them. I couldn't stop myself imagining the crash; imagining Reid driving somewhere. A sudden blow of force to his car that would change the trajectory of his life.
Tony saw the tears rolling down my cheeks. He moved to crouch in front of my chair, pulling me into a hug. Thankfully, he didn't try to say anything more. He just rocked me back and forth in his arms. I muffled my sobs into his shoulder. I cried everything away until eventually, swollen-eyed and heartsick, I allowed him to lead me to a room with beds. I doubted I could step into a car ever again.
I slept dreamlessly for an hour. Whirls of confusion enveloped me in dreams void of light and shadows.
I was swept into a familiar room. There were gleaming golden lights above us, and soft music. It was a slow dance, and this was Reid and I's winter formal in high school. A night filled with drinks and mistakes.
Reid turned to me, dressed in his suit. He was handsome as ever, radiating beauty as he reached for me, a smile gathering on his face. "Hey, gorgeous."
I reached out for his hand, my eyes hungrily searching his. There was a particular beauty in making others feel beautiful; Reid had it. He was a good person, first and foremost.
The night we spent together was idyllic. I was swept away in Reid's arms, burying my face into his suit as we slow danced. When we were younger, we seemed to have avoided the awkward stage of discomfort in our relationship. That was the benefit of going from friends to lovers.
It was impossible to tell whether Reid enjoyed the formal as much as I did, but from the way Reid's eyes always moved back to me, and the way his smile was ever-present, I interpreted that he did.
The odds were nearly impossible to beat; the near-zero possibility that we would find each other. But when we had the opportunity, we seized it.
"Don't give up on me." he whispered in my ear, his hands on my shoulders. When Reid moved away, giving me a tiny smile, I felt his absence. I watched him walk away from me, across the room with a million eyes staring at him.
Beauty, perfection; it was a shadow to hide behind. I concealed everything ugly about myself, to project the version that everyone knew. Reid was trying to escape the box he was pushed into. Formals were all about appearances. Reid and I did appearances better than anyone.
Through the bleak patterns of emptiness in my dream, I heard someone shift in a chair next to my bed. I cracked open my eyes to look at Tony. Reid's cousin was pale-faced, sitting in the chair next to my bed, with red eyes and bags underneath them. "I should have told you, first thing. About Reid, I mean."
"You have other priorities. It made sense." I said, my voice groggy with sleep.
"It wasn't like that. I thought that I needed to be alone. It was irresponsible and not cool of me to leave you behind, with no idea of what was happening."
"Yes." I said flatly. "It wasn't cool. But like I said, you had other priorities. What would bringing me here change? Everything would have happened the way it was supposed to. Reid would still forget me. He'd still be bedridden, maybe even comatose."
"Stop." Tony looked even paler. "Stop talking like that. How can you be so indifferent about it?"
What he really means is, how can I accept that my relationship with Reid has died? How can I give up when the battle hasn't even really started? I wanted to believe that we could go back to how things were. But we were inevitably going to break or be less than what we used to be. My worst fear was discovering it.
I think that was how I started to believe in fate, in some kind of cosmic interference that shook the foundations of life. It was like a seesaw effect; if there was too much happiness in someone's life, like my own, there was an incoming cloud of darkness to negate it. Balance ruled our lives.
I steeled myself, rubbing at my eyes. "This is the only way I can deal with the fallout at the moment, Tony. I don't know how else I can approach it. If I start crying again, I can't trust that I'll ever stop."
"That doesn't mean you should give up on my brother. Trust me, he'll always be the same person regardless of what's happened to him. I never once thought that you would back away from him, but I can see that you're already considering it. At least talk to him once before you extract yourself from his life."
"But it's not his life anymore, Tony. This isn't mine, either. I have to back away before one of us gets hurt. I'm trying to be the good person in this scenario."
"Mallory, don't you think I understand that?" Tony looked at me with genuine empathy in his eyes. "I'm here for you. Here with you. You don't have to deal with this alone. If you have to cry, I'll cry with you. I'll help you take it one step at a time, every day."
He looked like he did understand me, after all. How could he not, when we bore this grief?
I spoke to Tony for hours that day. We were always close, but I found myself reaching for him. Tony was closest to Reid; of course he knew the most about his cousin. Reminiscing with him fuelled my determination to keep hope. I could heal from this, however long it took.
When I went home to Reid and I's apartment, our relationship stared at me from every corner of every room. Pictures, love letters we hung up on the walls, snapshots of the life we led before today ever happened.
I ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet at last, heaving cries escaping me. When I got the energy to walk out, I went to the living room and tore down every picture I could see through my blurred vision. I sobbed as I piled them up, erasing every trace of Reid and I from our place.
My head spun. I realised vaguely that I couldn't stay here, because Reid was going to get better. Where would he live then? His parents were near, but he'd want his own space. I was taking up a corner of his life without his permission. I started packing my things away hastily, even though no one was there to chastise me. My aunt no longer lived near Collard, but I'd see if any of my friends would take me in temporarily.
Strangely, I didn't think I wanted Reid to remember me. It was better this way, with him forgetting that I existed in his life. It would have been so much easier to move on. But of course, that wasn't how things panned out.
I was stupid to think that I could ever heal from this.
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