The days and weeks I’ve been here in this hospital are a blur. They smear together, bleed together. How long have I been here? I don’t know. I haven’t kept track, and there is no way to measure the passage of time. There are no clocks, no calendars. Each day is the same, and today is like all the rest which have gone before: I wake to the hot African sun shining in through the dirty window facing my cot, stare up at the aged, yellowing popcorn ceiling above me, just breathing, watching wicker fan blades spin lazily, stirring the hot morning air around; eventually a nurse comes by.

“Help you into chair, now,” she says, each word thick and carefully pronounced. “Cast come off soon.”

I slide from the bed to the wheelchair. Settle in, and she wheels me to the bathroom, which is nothing but a toilet and a steel sink in a closet. I manage my morning ablutions alone, the little bit of privacy I’m afforded. And then the nurse wheels me down long corridors, popcorn ceiling above, dirty white unpainted drywall to either side, an occasional door on this side or that. A pained moan from behind a door, a snore from behind another, voices speaking low in a dialect I don’t understand from behind a third. There are no windows in this corridor, only the buzz of yellowish fluorescent tube lighting. Into the cafeteria, which is a cavernous room with tall ceilings, exposed rafters covered by a corrugated tin roof. Several picnic tables like you would see at a public park, the benches attached to the table. The food line is short, a single row of trays offering rice and beans and oatmeal, suspicious-looking meat of some kind, and fresh fruit harvested locally, all served by a short, fat old black man with a hair net and not enough teeth. He’s kind, always serving me extra fruit. There are about a dozen other patients in this wing of the hospital, most of them locals, and all of them either terminal or unable to leave for some reason—I’m in the long-term care wing, I’ve deduced. None of the other patients have tried to befriend me, mainly because of the language barrier. I’ve learned a few phrases of Malinké and Susu, the predominant local languages, according to Dr. James, and a little bit of French—enough to be able to make conversation with the nurses who tend to me.

I eat, and then take a Styrofoam cup of weak, burnt coffee out to the veranda, to my spot in the corner. The veranda is my favorite place in the hospital—it’s a screened in porch, facing a stand of palm trees, through which I can see hints of the ocean. It’s hot out here, but it’s quiet and solitary, since few other patients ever spend time here. As I sit facing the screen, to my left is the bulk of the rest of the hospital, low, long, and squat, made of old crumbling brick in some places, with newer additions more hastily built of cheaper materials.

There’s a wicker fan overhead, spinning fast enough to create at least an impression of moving air; it creaks as it rotates, and wobbles. I sit out here for hours, sweating, writing, thinking. Remembering, and trying to remember.

Today, I’m out of sorts. Irritable, sullen, and uncomfortable. I need…something. It’s hotter than usual today, and I feel a strange sort of longing inside me.

No, longing isn’t the right word. I don’t know. I can’t make sense of how I’m feeling, and so I turn again to the one thing that can ever help me make sense of myself and my feelings and my thoughts: my notebooks, and the outpouring of words from my pen:

[From a handwritten journal; date unknown]

I feel…

I don’t know. For once, I don’t know if I have the words.

I feel pregnant with memory. It is THERE. It is WITHIN me. But I just cannot reach it. Cannot get it out. I need desperately to give birth to it. It is painful. I am stretched out with it, weighed down by it, but it will not emerge.

Sometimes, like a lovesick teenager, I write your name over and over and over again. I fill pages with it.

I think the nurses think me mad in truth, although I know deep down this is only temporary. Mad with need. Mad with grief? Mad with desperation. I know not what all. Only that I am mad and cannot stop it.

I write your name, Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Perhaps I hope that by writing your name so many times, I will jog loose another memory.

I simply must know, whether for good or ill, who I am and what I have done and how I came to be here. I must KNOW.

The madness I feel, it is from the not knowing.

From the burgeoning, swollen belly of memory I feel growing in me, through me. Ready to explode, but never quite doing so.

I write like a madman now. Some of it is nearly illegible, hastily scrawled, the penmanship cramped and crabbed and messy from hours of clutching a pen. I write from the moment I awake to the moment I fall asleep, out of desperation to disgorge the monstrous thing lurking inside me.

I can’t take this much longer, or I will very truly careen willingly into full, gibbering, frothing, straitjacketed madness.

---

Dr. James finds me on the veranda, dragging a chair over to sit beside me. I set my notebook aside, and use the end of the pen to dig underneath the cast around my wrist, scratching an itch.

“I think we can remove those casts very soon. This week.” Dr. James gestures at the notebook. “Have you remembered anything?”

I shake my head. “Not since the memory about my son.”

“How do you feel about that memory?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. I feel a little…crazy, to be honest.”

Dr. James leans forward. “Crazy? How do you mean?”

I shrug, and fiddle with the pen. “Just…like…” I groan. “Fuck, I don’t know how to describe it. Like there’s so much inside me, just beneath the surface, and no matter how much I write, it won’t come out. Not to be too graphic, but it’s like being constipated, or something.”

Dr. James nods understandingly. “Do you remember anything about your son, besides the memory you wrote about?”

I don’t answer for a while. “It’s hard to think about.” I try to picture Henry, my son, and an image bubbles up; I try to describe it for Dr. James. “If I picture him, I see him as a baby. Old enough that he mostly sleeps through the night. He’s got Ava’s hair, lots of dark hair. My eyes, dark brown. Chubby cheeks. Grabby little fingers. He was always clutching at my face.”

Dr. James lets the silence breathe for a moment, and when he speaks his voice is soft and probing. “Tell me more about Henry.”

“I remember…I remember waking up. It was late. I went into his room and he was lying on his back, feet kicking as he cried, little fists shaking. He was pissed, like just so angry. So I picked him up, and realized he had a poopy diaper. So I changed him. He was still fussy, so I carried him out into the kitchen and made a bottle of some formula. It was a beautiful night outside. We lived on the beach—I don’t know where, California or Florida, maybe? I can’t remember. I just have this image of looking out of a sliding glass door and seeing a beach, and the ocean, and a huge full moon hanging just over the horizon, reflecting on the rippling waves. I have this feeling of peace, of joy, of happiness.”

I swallow hard, and keep going.

“I remember taking Henry outside onto the back porch. It was just this little square concrete slab surrounded by some fence, separating our porch from our neighbors on either side, with a gate so we could go out to the beach. We had a table and two chairs out there, and I remember sitting with Henry in one of the chairs, feeding him the bottle and looking out at the ocean. He was awake, staring up at me as he guzzled down that bottle, and his little hands would—” my throat catches, and I have to start over. “He would grab at my hands. Squeeze my finger with his hands as he drank. Just blink up at me. He’d smile, sometimes, and milk would dribble down his chin.” I laugh, and it’s half sob. “That’s what I remember.”

Dr. James is quiet a while. Eventually he nods slowly. “It is a good memory. Yes?”

I nod. “Yeah. It’s a good one.”

“Hold on to it, my friend. You have been through very much, I think. Remember the good things. There is sorrow, to be sure, but there is also joy.” He stands up, and pats my shoulder. “Let the sorrow pass through you, and cling to the joy. It is all we can do, sometimes.”

“Thanks.”

“But of course.”

“No, I mean for getting me to talk about Henry.”

Dr. James just smiles at me, waving. “I will return tomorrow. Perhaps we can see about those casts, yes?”

It will be wonderful to be free of the casts, to have mobility again.

But…there is still so much I don’t know about myself, and my past.