Pieces

Chapter One - There Was Nothing

"Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence.  Nothingness is disturbing." - Timothy Morton

Have you ever really tried to think of nothing?  I don't mean clearing your mind, I mean thinking of the thing - nothing.  Which is sort of an oxymoron, I guess.  Absolute nothing is nearly impossible to imagine.  I mean the Bible, supposedly the greatest book of all time, started out trying to describe the absolute nothing that existed before God breathed the breath of life into the first tiny amoeba, and even then, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."    You can probably imagine empty, and I bet you have a pretty good concept of the dark, but they're not nothing either.  They hold space.  They can be seen.  And so they exist.  Go ahead.  Keep trying.  You'll only succeed in giving yourself a headache and an aching sense of existential dread.

But I can remember nothing.

I know the utter black vacuum of the moment before my life began.  Not when pulled forth screaming from my mother's womb, but when I painfully opened my eyes.

This all sounds very poetic and intellectual.  It's more like super weird.  Because as far as I know, I didn't exist before I woke up in that hospital bed six months ago.  I opened my eyes to two strangers sitting on the end of my bed, who told me they were my mom, Kathy and my dad, Peter, and that my name is Anna Harrison.  And I believed them, because that room and those two people were all that existed in the world.  They told me about the horrible car accident during our cross country move. How I was driving the family car behind the U-Haul and got hit head-on by a sleepy semi driver, trying to make it home before his son's birthday party. He didn't make it.  Because he's dead. But I'm very lucky, they told me.  

Thank goodness my parents both have medical degrees (among their many academic achievements), or they never would have been able to keep me alive until help could arrive.  How fortuitous that a world class surgical team and organ transplant program existed at the nearest hospital.  How blessed I am that donor organs were available to me and that my body didn't reject them.  How fortunate that the hundreds of skin grafts creating the world's ugliest subway map across my body did not become infected.  And how joyous both my parents were that even though it would take months of painful physical therapy, the doctors were certain I would learn to walk and talk and be  a "regular girl" again.

I'll spare you the Rocky Balboa style montage of me taking those first agonizing steps.  Or that moment of everyone clapping when I finally said my first word.  It was "leave," by the way.  Because I was tired of being poked and prodded and encouraged into being a human again.  They didn't leave.  They bought a cake and celebrated.  You don't get to see them change my bandages and deal with all the ooze and pus.  I know some people are into that kind of thing, but you'll just have to stick to pimple popping videos to get your fix.  I have no desire to revisit the moment.  It sucked.  It hurt.  I was tired and scared and angry and confused a lot and it honestly didn't seem worth it.  But nobody gave me a choice.

At first I didn't ask my parents about the past.  You don't care much about that kind of thing when every breath you take is its own little horror movie.  But once I was well enough to watch TV, I got hooked on Dawson's Creek (it's from the 90's, look it up if you don't know) and suddenly realized I had potentially packed six or more seasons of drama, hook ups, petty crime and lies into my BTA life (BTA stands for Before the Apocalypse - my parents hate it that I call it that, but it's quicker to say than traumatic brain injury).  I wish the Apocalypse had destroyed that little part of my brain that manufactures curiosity.  But it didn't, and suddenly I had a deep seeded need to know who I had been.

I don't have any proof yet, but I think my mom and dad are liars.  Hard core accusation I guess, but you haven't met my mom and dad.  Smartest, most articulate nerds you could ever meet, but if you ask them something about what I was like between years 0 and 16, they go all red and itchy.  They look at each other, silently playing out some kind of rock, paper, scissors game of who's going to have to answer the question this time.  They take a lot of deep breaths and pauses, like they want to be sure and remember what they've said in case the question comes up again on the next exam.  So I stopped asking and bided my time.

I figured I'd eventually get sprung from that hospital.  And then I'd snoop.  Photographs, embarrassing tap dancing videos, birth certificates, girl scout awards, baby teeth - there had to be mountains of data to mine.  Guess what?  My parents put everything in storage when the accident interrupted our move and the whole place burned to the ground.  So my past is based entirely on a pile of black ashes and my ever growing suspicion that I was sprung fully formed from the thigh of my father like Athena.

I did get out of the hospital, and we finally moved to the idyllic small town of Ingolstadt, Texas. If you think that's a mouthful, try pronouncing Nacogdoches (the original Texas settlers clearly didn't mind a silent consonant or two).  If you didn't understand what I meant by idyllic, Ingolstadt is small and boring.  The town's claim to fame is that it was hometown to a long dead country singer who wrote a song about the lines on his mother's hands.  Apparently it's a real Mother's Day favorite and his family is still living the glamorous life off the royalties.  If you want to know anything else, there's a life size statue of him on the town square.  Somebody cleans off the bird poop once a week so you can read the plaque.

I'm about to start high school.  Well, I mean, I went to high school before, according to good ole Anna and Peter, and I was a straight A student who loved math and science.  They said I was bullied at my old school and it was one of the reasons we moved.  So no bestie to remind me of all my childhood secrets either.  Trust me, I'm as frustrated by all the dead ends as you are.  

Mom wanted me to homeschool, but Dad thinks I need the socialization as part of my recovery process.  I just want to talk to someone who isn't related to me.  It's bad enough that I don't have a past; my future cannot stay this boring. So I'm lying in my bed waiting for the alarm to go off that tells me to take my 1am meds.  I take them every three hours. It's supposed to keep me from rejecting all the organs and skin they used to patch me back together.  Stopping the meds is not an option if I want to continue existing.  And despite what I said before about all the therapy not being worth it, I want to.  I want something to exist about me that wasn't given to me by somebody else.  I want to start making a past for my future.

I bet my parents are still up, too. Working down in their lab. They don't let me down there.  Something about cross contamination.  They're doing some kind of flavor research for a potato chip company.  Super top secret stuff.  And I know, we're talking about fried root vegetables here, but you'd be surprised at the level of espionage in the commercial snack industry.  They'll check on me when my alarm goes off, to make sure I don't miss my dose.  And if they see that I'm up, they'll get all worried and then my mom will want to sleep on the floor in my room again and my dad will insist on drawing some blood to send to my doctor, Dr. Moritz (those pesky parental medical degrees mean they can do stuff like that) to see if we need to adjust my medication and they might not let me go to school after all.  

I pretend to sleep but I never do.  You can tell me that is physically impossible, and I can agree with you based on common medical knowledge but I. Don't. Sleep.  Not unless they make me and I don't like to take the stuff that knocks me out because I never dream. I just float in that nothing space again and all I can say is, be happy you can't imagine nothing.  It's terrifying. There's no air, there's no light, there's no thought, there's no hope. There's just NOTHING.

So I'm going to pretend to go to sleep.  Then wake up and smile at my parents while they watch me take my meds and pretend to go back to sleep again, counting the hours until I start being Anna Harrison for real.  I don't know who she is, but I don't care.  I just want to start because...

I forgot my whole life.

But I can remember nothing.