Forgotten

It's half past seven in the morning, and Wre has to go for a bath. She opens the tap and lets the water rush in. The flow's impatience is duly noted. The water flows like a bunch of thick velvet ribbons, not uniform but leaping here and there, within a vertical essence. "Around twenty-seven days ago, a year came to a close at college," she says. "A year of swinging between the depths of despair, the heights of happiness and everything in between. After the hysterical euphoria associated with finishing the Final Exams, the autumn leaves of after-thought started rustling about in your mind. A year. An entire range of three hundred and sixty-five days. It was as if time had been sitting quietly in a classroom and you had skidded to a stop outside it, exclaiming in shocked silence to yourself, "You're over .. already?!"

She steps outside the steamy warmth of the bathroom and walks around to find her towel and clothes. She checks the store-room for a new bottle of shampoo, and finally steps back in with everything she needs. She hangs her clothes and continues. "Time seems to have played hide-and-seek, showing itself in leisure, seeking action from you when you would wait with impatience for a boring teacher's lectures to finish. Hiding itself with quietude when you would sit with a friend in contented silence, after a thought-provoking conversation. Time is a slippery reality. The present seems like moving in a cloud, the past is like footsteps you can't get back and the future like walking with an umbrella open in front of your face - you can see only so much far ahead."

She wants to keep talking, and the familiarity of warm water helps her. "An elastic concept of time seems biologically irrational," she says. "What it would be like for people with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's? How would it feel to be trapped in - "

The telephone rings. Wre hangs her head and sighs. Putting a little foam on the tap's top like a conversational bookmark, she wraps herself in premature dryness and goes to pick it up. She's tired of communication and doesn't want to make conversation right now. Her shoulders sag a little more when she sees the number. There are a number of social repercussions if she doesn't pick up this call. On the other line is Opa, a self-imposed friend. Suddenly, Wre gets a bright idea. She picks the phone slowly and hearing a high-pitched "Hello??" from the receiver's head, breathes slowly into the receiver's mouth. The indignant hello is shocked into silence and curiosity takes over her friend, enough to shut her up. Wre breathes again, this time making it sound sinister by flicking her tongue against her upper teeth. Opa promptly disconnects the call. Wre breathes - to herself. She goes back into the bathroom, stares hard at the foam on the top and successfully picks up from where she'd left.


" - your memories? If being walled in between your memories is terrifying, imagine what it would be like to consciously lose them. You remember the opening scenes of the movie, The Pianist, where a Jewish family in Warsaw is preparing to flee the city during the Nazi invasion on Poland? The family members are packing frantically and in pathetic absence of mind, the old husband asks his wife, "Do you think I should take this picture along? I bought it a long time ago, do you think I should pack it? Do you think I should take it?" His wife, interrupted in her nervous urgency tells him to do whatever he wants. This was one of the many scenes in this terrifying movie which hit you and got stuck in your head, disturbing you like an ant crawling across your scalp. What would you do if you had to pack all your things and just - leave? A critical element in dementia is ignorance - you just don't know. But what if you knew what you were leaving behind forever?"


Wre shuddered. The shampoo was supposed to comfort her with its lathering softness but the comfort was too dermal to reach her. She took a breath and went on.

"Something equally disturbing is short-term memory loss. Forgetting a past which consisted of recent seconds is like invisible sand slipping through your fingers. You know something has gone by, but your mind is like vacuum - the emptiness is too solid. There is nothing which reminds you of anything, not even a wisp of a recollection. It's like an absolute whiteness."

Wre stops. She finally realises she can't escape anymore. She hates the word 'maybe' and wants to try actually talking and remembering at the same time. Some conversations, like the ones she has with Opa make her drag her full-stops all the way to the end of her sentences, because Opa doesn't have a conversation, she just talks and expects a response. She doesn't understand reluctance. So you have to keep ploughing on with your sentence till you reach the end of Opa's patience.

Wre had tried talking to another girl at her college, but she realised it exposed the freckles on her memory retention abilities too barely. In school, she had heard her Biology teacher tell her class the story of two goldfishes in a bowl. They would introduce themselves every time they swam around the bowl and met each other, because goldfishes have three-second memories. She was the only one in her class who had not laughed. When she was twenty-one years old her parents decided to send her to a mental institution, because Wre was incapable of having a proper conversation with anyone, let alone live her life. Give her three minutes, and she would forget what and where she'd started, whatever she'd started. Her only friend, Opa, stuck with her because nobody had Wre's endurance abilities, and nobody else would talk with Wre so consistently, despite her mind mumbling off into the land of no recall more often than not.

She gets up, dries herself and continues. "I hope the medication helps you. As far as I remember, I think you're beginning to get better. You remembered the supervisor's name and reached ninety-seven in counting class. It'll be fine, you just need to give yourself some time."

Feeling sunnier, she puts her clothes on and dries her towel outside. The nurse announces that it is lunch-time, and Wre walks towards the Main Hall, singing a self-composed song to herself,

"An itch in an unreachable patch
Of my head, in my head .. "