Elsewhere

CHAPTER 4: The Oblivion and the Dream

"Great, another child with no memories. We build a whole world to help people remember and we end up like this." The doctor grumbled. That memory loss was pretty common lately and it really started getting to his nerves. "Joanne will take care of this one." He decided, moving on to another case.
Joanne was the most experienced nanny in the recovery section and something - if not his inner voice at least the black stamp on the document - told him that a huge bag of patience would've been required to help that human healing.

As predicted, the child had shown no sign of improvement since they were found and so magnanimously saved. The disease that had infested their body and mind was radical and twisted. Not that illness was the correct term, just to be clear, but in the absence of anything else, that word was carelessly misused. It would have probably been more appropriate to say that they were in the middle of a troubled path of healing, but the negative meaning was certainly easier to drop in brief conversations.
-Huh, the new one? Well, you know, they're sick. It's an uncertain situation... yes, it's a strange disease.- They went on and on like this, the Masters, with no real need for someone to be listening.
-Well, the symptoms are emblematic... No, we don't know exactly. They're asleep for now.-

Sleeping.
That was also a misleading term.
They were trapped by an unbreakable sleep, so deep that not even the warmth of the timid sun could wake them. It would have been good, if it was a carrier of rest, but in the throes of terrible nightmares, the little one was wagging and gasping, shouting and screaming to ward off something – or someone – that haunted their soul.

Not even the Masters could find a way to calm down those moans and complaints of pain and fear. They couldn't even bear to stay in the small room more than a few minutes: they just went out and continued to promulgate that word.

Illness.

They twisted it within their lips, like a candy, or between their fingers, like a talisman, to relieve them of the responsibility to see what was really going on.

When the child finally regained possession of their body it was only to get rid of what their little stomach still contained and thus the crying was replaced by more fragmented sounds, full of nauseating humidity.
Small pieces of their spirit, of what they were and what they had been, everything tried to abandon them: memories, images, emotions. With poisoned claws they climbed from the recesses of their soul to look for freedom, tearing them apart.
Act of mercy? Hope for future happiness? Maybe, but in the meantime they relentlessly dissolved every bond they had with their Memory, leaving it more and more drained, perhaps freer, but painfully condemned to live without a Past. And since their Present was that illness and no Future was visible towards, even a part of them seemed willing to get rid of them as quickly as possible, because maybe - they hoped - they could start breathing again, once everything was erased.
Some part of them – who knows which and who knows how important – wished to reject those voids that suffocated their souls and those Memories that emptied them of any desire and will to live again.

Their eyes were wide open, but they couldn't see anything. They just stood still, paralysed, as if that way they could make themselves invisible to the eyes of the ghosts that infested the days and nights that began to overlap each other, in a race without brakes, from time to time longer and interminable.

Many doctors came to visit them, but no one found a remedy to those sobs that destroyed them from the inside, that devoured and consumed them, shadow after shadow.
Maybe it would have been enough to change the profession. If, for example, by chance, a musician had arrived, maybe something could have been done, but Earth forbid science ever to be questioned.

A dark figure stood still, immune to the torment that ravaged anyone who sat at the child's bedside. He could see the vast heavy white hand of void inexorably grasping everything on its path. Anything that belonged to that unhappy child, Dreams and Memories, was torn, eradicated; every seed on its way was removed and stolen.

That darn Oblivion.

Then, one day something changed. They were almost conscious.

Once the mattress would have seemed cozy, compared to the stone of the streets, but over time they had learned to hate their coffin. When they woke up, they were alone in the room.
-What are your names?- They asked with a wire of voice, without moving their lips. 
-I have none.- Answered a deep voice from the dark.
-I'll call you Xewn then. - Their voice was choked, no more than an unimaginable whisper.
-I am Xewn, the Dream.- The Shadow answered.

And with that simple act of naming, which seemed nothing, but in reality it was all that mattered, they began to reclaim the world.