Present Day

 

When I woke up, his face was pinned to my frontal lobe. I didn’t know if I’d been dreaming about him. I hardly dreamed anymore. For that, you needed memories, or so they said.

But it was him. I would know that face anywhere. He was famous. Brian McMurray played for the Florida Sharks and he was on the news all the time.

That wasn’t the only reason why I knew his face. Once upon a time, just after the accident, he had spent time with me. He had tried to convince me that I knew him and I loved him.

I didn’t. Then again, I didn’t know much anymore. There was a time when my life had been full of memories and achievements. Now, they were just words on paper, evidence of a life I couldn’t remember.

I had to get out of bed and get ready to cheer at a football game, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this Brian guy. As a general rule, I tried not to think of things that remind me that I can’t remember my past, but right now, he was stuck in my head. And thinking about him made me think of all the things I couldn’t remember.

The accident had robbed me of my past, and in the process, I had lost my identity. We are the sum of our experiences, and all I had left was what everyone told me about mine. Therefore, even though I wished I could have remembered his handsome, caring looking face, I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough identity of my own to know what someone else had been like in what I started to refer to as my “past life.”

The accident had happened the night of our senior prom, or so they told me. I had fallen off the cliff at High Rock and hit my head on a rock. I had lost so much. I was still alive, and the doctors said it was a miracle.

I was in a coma for weeks and they weren’t sure I was going to wake up. When I finally did, it was as if I was starting with a blank page when I should have had a whole book filled with memories of my life. At first, I wasn’t as grateful as everyone else seemed that I was alive. To have no memories, no identity, no sense of who I even was, often felt just the same as being dead, anyway.

I couldn’t remember important milestones. Some facts were just missing. I knew some people well, and others got upset because they had been there just as long, and I didn’t know who they were at all.

Brian had been one of those people. Apparently, he’d been my boyfriend of two years. The one who had taken my virginity just before the accident.

That didn’t count. If I couldn’t remember it, it hadn’t happened.

When I saw Brian on the field last night, I had felt something. A jolt of some kind. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know why I would feel that way. Except for the three months he’d tried to bring me back, and I had tried so hard to push him away because I was frustrated with not being able to remember him, he was a stranger to me. But strangers didn’t elicit that kind of response.

I pressed my hand against my temple, feeling the scar. Only the tip was visible. The rest of it disappeared into my hair which had grown again, thank God. But the scar was there as a constant reminder of everything I’d lost.

It wasn’t just my past, either. I struggled to plan for the future. No one knows how much we build on our past until we don’t have it anymore.

Seeing Brian had made me feel different this time. Before, when he’d insisted I was his girlfriend, I had wanted desperately to get away from him. He’d been a stranger, comfortable with touching me when I didn’t know who the hell he was. All I’d wanted was for him to leave me alone.

This time, when I’d seen him, I’d had to fight the urge to go to him. Something about him had been magnetic.

That scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know what I was feeling, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with this.

At first, everyone had been full of hope that I would get my memories back. I was young, healthy, and fit. The doctors had predicted a speedy recovery. As the months had passed, it had become clear that there was nothing. I wouldn’t remember.

Slowly, the people who had tried so hard at first faded away. I had fewer and fewer friends left. They told me I’d changed. How could I have not changed when the cornerstones of who I was had been removed? Finally, only my parents were left, and I had to start over, building a life on nothing.

I had graduated from school, but I couldn’t remember what I’d learned. I had been enrolled in college, but when I started, I couldn’t focus in class, and learning new things was hard.

Finally, I gave up and fell back on the only thing I knew, the one thing that coursed through my veins like nothing else. Fitness.

I had always been active, with a curvy hourglass, athletic figure, and even though my mind knew nothing, my body remembered. My muscles knew what they had to do, which gave a whole new meaning to the term “muscle memory.” Cheerleading was the one thing I had left, and I threw myself into it. Everyone said I had already been the best cheerleader on the team prior to my accident, but now I had somehow gotten even better at it.

Fast forward five years, and I was one of the most sought-after coaches for women’s cheerleading. I had taken high school teams to nationals. I had trained teams for major sporting events. And I dabbled in personal training on the side.

Slowly, I had created a new life for myself.

Brian’s face flashed in front of me again, but I shook it off. After everything I’d gone through to get back on my feet, I didn’t need reminders of everything I’d lost.

I got into the shower and got ready for the game. I was a busy person with no time to dwell on sad things from the past. Concentrating on my present and future was how I kept moving forward, or else I would be too depressed about the past.

I had something in the here and now to do— just like I always do— and it was time to do it. No matter how much these persistent thoughts of this Brian guy tried to get in my way.