#sprolden

… I’m aware it’s a defense mechanism, or something like that.

In moments of high impact, extreme stress, or trauma, the brain protects itself by blocking, dissociating, or simply filing away the memory in an attempt to safeguard our mental health and avoid continuous suffering.

As if forgetting something could help the wound close faster. Stop the bleeding.

But I feel my wound festers. It gets contaminated. The very uncertainty of not remembering causes me more pain than I felt when the blood poured in streams from my chest and arms.

My days have felt dimmer ever since.

Perhaps it’s simply Scotland’s depressing weather.

Perhaps it’s me, who never allowed myself to truly see the sun. For every time it came out, I hid behind a wall built of false indifference and cynicism.

When you left, I thought you’d be a pleasant memory.

And you were.

You were pleasant. You were important. You were loved.

But the more I tried to see you, the more you faded. As if I were looking at you through fogged glass.

Like when the dirty bus window kept me from seeing you pedaling your bike at incredible speed, just to keep pace with me.

I found myself searching for you everywhere.

First, I looked for you in my phone gallery. Then I gave up. I realized I wouldn’t find you.

At that moment, I thought the best thing would be to delete your photos and videos.

That was what everyone expected me to do.

I thought it would hurt less.

That, this way, I could avoid each time I’d saw your face, another fragment of my heart crack even further.

I never thought I’d end up desperately searching for proof that you really existed.

That I hadn’t invented you, as a last resort, to keep myself from falling completely into the void that was my mind.

The first thing that vanished from me was your hair.

It was hard to remember how the curls used to tangle in my fingers. How they would spring back, like a coil, after being stretched.

Whether their color was like the coffee I drank on nights when I convinced myself I needed to stay awake studying,

Or more like the mud that stuck to the soles of my boots after endless damp night walks when I couldn’t stop thinking.

Then came your hands.

I forgot the way they touched me.

The way your fingers sought mine as we walked, ending up intertwined. The vast difference between the size of your palm and the smallness of mine.

The space your arms covered when they wrapped around me in moments when my chest felt ready to burst.

“It’s okay,” I told myself.

“I still have your eyes. Your face. Your voice and your laughter.”

And I did.

Until I noticed I frowned every time I heard another man with a voice like yours.

“Was it like that?” I asked myself.

“No, it was a little deeper.”

“Oh, wait, maybe it was higher.”

Or maybe not. Maybe it was more relaxed, less tense. Maybe it was quieter, more centered.

Perhaps your voice dropped lower when saying my name.

You seemed to have this particular way of pronouncing it, as if it weren’t just any name. As if it were something important.

Something worth speaking clearly.

Then your eyes disappeared.

I couldn’t picture the exact shape of your glasses. How square they were, or how thick the glass. The size of your sockets through them.

I lost count of your eyelashes. How curled they were.

I lost orientation. Whether the left represented the sea and the right represented nature, or if maybe I was mistaken.

Maybe it was the other way around.

Maybe the left was the leaves of the trees while the right was the reflection of the blue sky in rain puddles.

Or maybe that day the sky wasn’t so blue.

It was cloudy.

Or was it mild?

And how did the trees look? How were their leaves?

Was it autumn or spring?

And finally, I reached your face.

This dead end.

The rain of my memory seemed to erase completely the traces I used to leave after kissing you from cheek to jawline.

The tide carried away the ship full of your smiles. The bottles that contained the way the corners of your mouth lifted and your gums showed when a spark of happiness landed in your body.

I also lost how the bridge of your nose fell to its tip. I still wonder if it was a steep drop or if, in the end, it lifted slightly toward the sky, hoping to find something to hold onto and not fall all at once.

I stopped recognizing the difference between your gaze and everyone else’s.

You were hungry.

So very hungry.

Hungry to learn. To split me open like a book and read every line of my manual.

To understand me.

To know why yes and why no.

To comprehend, even just a little, how I saw the world.

But I stopped seeing it long ago.

Stopped caring to memorize more things.

Because what good would it be to remember so many details and so many mathematical formulas,

If in no form,

Nor in any dictionary.

Could I find the answer to a single doubt.

Your name.

… Holden.

Was it Michael…