Sometimes waiting is hard. Sometimes remembering is too painful, but sometimes, remembering is all you can do. It comes from one song, maybe a few words, but when they come back, they hit you. They hit you in waves with every note, or in shots and burns from drinks you can't even manage to pronounce. They hit her in the notes of a song. One she hadn't heard the same since that day.
She can remember the words, every pause, every place to breathe. The words make her mind lull into a daze. The daze is a somber one, where rain hits the window of the car she's in. The radio plays the first notes, piano keys reverberating off the windows and into her bones. He always liked having the volume high, saying, "Music is meant to be felt, not just heard." every time she brought up how loud it was. He'd laugh and hold her hand as she rolled her eyes.
She didn't mean to press on the button, to press on the video of someone singing that song. Maybe she did mean to listen to it though, to test herself and see just how far she was able to recover.
The voice wasn't the same as the original singer that day, but somehow that made it all the more hurtful. Every breath she saw the singer take, the further she was thrown back into her mind.
He had sang along that day, softly, just a bit above the gentle rain that was starting to pick up. His voice was on another level. She'd tease him about how he could have gone and became a singer, and he'd just laugh with a cloudy look. In his grey car, that's what he did that day. The clouds were dark.
She ran a hand through her short hair. It was getting a bit longer now that a few months had passed, but she had no intention of keeping it short anyways. The lights in her bedroom were off so that the window was the only source of light, besides her laptop playing the song that is.
In a way, when her memories rang through her ears, it wasn't like she was totally out of the present. She wasn't all the way in it though either. It wasn't exactly her mind that went back, but her heart too. When the chorus of the song began and the notes louder, everything came back at once. The memory in all, no longer pieces, played.
The song came to its middle and so did the storm with its climax. The rain was louder, the winds stronger, the roads invisible. She was holding his hand tightly with hers. There was his voice, calming her loudly through the rain. It was one of the freakiest storms the country had seen. The car was parked on the side of the road like so many others in the standstill, all of the blinking lights calling out to each other in unification. In reassurance that no one was going through the storm alone. The two of them had moved to the back seat of the car to wait out the rest of the storm as the song continued.
She remembers the rain's color reflected in his brown eyes as they looked into hers.
"We'll be fine. If anyone isn't safe, it's definitely Renaldo here." He had joked, patting the car door. Renaldo's door.
The two of the had laughed about it and moved on to talk and listen. When the song was coming to a close, just when they could hear the beginning of the silence of music being changed, another car swung into the side of Renaldo. He had shielded her with his body, since the car spun in from his side, but the two of them were laying with their heads on the same side as well. The storm didn't stop, and as she watched his eyes close, it seemed like the ending note of the sone wouldn't either.
That day turned into a blaring pain in her head, a wound that made a scar on the back of her neck and nothing more. The song on her computer replayed. The memory took another turn.
It recalled the rain cooling her burning pain into something numb. It recalled the red that washed off into pink on his white shirt. It recalled the brown eyes that faded from her vision as his eyes shut and hers closed within seconds.
They were rushed to the hospital where they both stayed for a few months, unconscious. Finally, she woke up first from her bed next to him. She had cried that early morning. Cried until she had to be put back into a deep sleep. Her eyes, half closed, watched his face. Her hand held his. She stayed by his side for another month before he too woke up.
He woke up without sound.
She felt his hand squeeze her and the two of them watched the other silently. Her tears were the first things that broke that silence, as he reached to her and wiped them away. Without saying much, the room was filled with doctors. The next thing she knew, she was told he had amnesia. That he didn't remember anything about her, or about Renaldo. Nothing from their relationship. He remembered where he moved in, so close to her, but that was it.
He remembered everything up until the day they began to date. Even then, when the months had passed and they had talked, he only remembered tiny bits and pieces. Never fully her, never fully his again. Not yet and she never knew when, or if he'd ever remember again.
With a shaky breath, the song stopped and she closed her laptop. She drifted over to the window and looked out. The building near hers, the one he stayed in, had just one person outside on the balcony like her. When she swallowed the tears, as if on autopilot, her voice formed the words and melody.
He turned to her.
From his balcony a radio was playing, and in the light of his apartment, she could see the tears in his familiar brown eyes.
