I woke up.
That's the first thing I remember. Waking up. It seems like a trivial everyday thing, but that first memory of waking up changed my life.
I was three when I woke up, three, with no memories just thoughts and an odd sense of knowing. I knew my name, I knew how old I was, I knew me, but that was it. I didn't know where I was, how I got there, or if I had family.
I just knew my name and my age.
Alicia Martinez. Age: 3
It was scary actually thinking about it now. Scary that I woke up as if it was a new life, a new start. I know at age three I'm not expected to have memories of the time before that, but it wasn't just that I didn't have memories; I didn't know anything only about me and even then it wasn't much. Like I said I knew my name and my age. That's it.
It was as if everything I knew before had been cleared gone as if I was just born. It's unsettling. Even now I can't help but wonder what I have forgotten. Sure I've been told a few things here and there, but it feels as if the experiences or memories they are telling me involved a different person not me. I don't get a familiar feeling or get glimpses of anything. It's blank an empty void behind that first memory of waking up. Just an empty white space that is being drawn in by what other people tell me.
You see the movies where a person wakes up in a body. Sometimes their own or someone else's body. They don't remember anything few are even lucky to know who they are. Some try to be who they were before they woke up other's just take it and restart. Yet you see a difference the people around them see a difference whether the person tried to be the same or not.
The person is changed sometimes it is subtle other times it's painfully obvious, but every knows the person is different. It's not who they knew before, but someone new. That' what happened to me. Waking up began a new life for me. Whatever was in the past before that day was gone. Whoever I was before that day was gone. When I woke up it was a new me, a new beginning, a restart to a new life and it began by opening my eyes.
