Creeps, true stories from Reddit (Second book)

Remember me

Did you know that some indigenous languages and cultures have no sense of past and future? Take the Pirahã tribe on the Amazon rainforest for example. Their language, also called Pirahã, is considered the hardest known language to learn because of that – and the fact that it involves whistles.
Because they only feel the need to express themselves in the present tense, they disregard anything that they didn't personally see. That's one of the main reasons why they remained isolated and no one was able to catechize them; Jesus is too far in the past for the Pirahã to even acknowledge him.
As a civilization with a strong sense of material and spiritual heirloom, however, one of our most basic social instincts is wanting to be remembered. We want to outlive ourselves, make sure we are important enough to leave a mark in History, or at least in someone else's path.
What would happen if the person you love the most in the world was forgotten the moment they leave your sight? If they always slipped out of your reach, no matter how much you wrote about them, took their picture or used every and any possible tool to register and immortalize their existence?
My story begins outside a coffee shop under the unforgiving rain of mid-April, 2014.
"A change for granny, please?" an old, decrepit lady clucked, the raspy voice of an almost-dying person touching my heart. It wasn't much, but I took a ten-dollar bill from my purse and extended to her.
She raised her cataract eyes to me.
"Oh, my beautiful child! God bless you! Let me repay by reading your future", she immediately grabbed my hand with her two own, surprisingly strong for a little hunchback lady, no younger than 70.
She ran her dirty, chastised fingers through my right palm, while I held a blue umbrella for the two of us with my left hand, lowering my eyes as people looked at me with annoyance; I had created a small pedestrian traffic jam by stopping there.
What uneasiness I might have felt from the interaction was drowned by the thought that, being an orphan, it could very well be myself in her place – begging for pennies under bad weather –, had I not lucked out.
"Your mother is unknown. Father drank himself to death after putting you in the system", she stated.
I was flabbergasted. I had only learned about my father as an adult, and I was still searching for information on my biological family.
"Don't look for your origins. You won't like what you find, might you find something", she added, eerily. I instinctively pulled back my hand, the air suddenly too cold for me to bear.
"Umm, okay, thank you", I managed, getting ready to leave.
"One more thing, child", she nonchalantly grabbed my hand again. "You'll be gone by your 30th birthday. Erased."
"I'll die?" I asked, skeptically but as politely as I could. Being 23, the big 30 felt like a distant possibility.
"You'll wish", she replied simply, her voice drowned by the lights and sounds and the vague but very solid fear that crawled inside my guts.
***
My life has been good since then. Somehow, I locked up this memory and waltzed through the past six years happily, carefree.
Back then I had just met Dylan, and I was head over heels for him – every bit as I still am. They say the pink flames of love-sickness don't last more than two years before the chemicals in your brain grow used to it and things aren't as shiny and mellow as they used to.
But my feeling for him was way more than a mere dopamine-induced infatuation. It gave meaning to everything I went through in life so I could meet him. Nothing ever felt so real, so sugary, so tender, so deep.
The moment he told me he felt the same and kissed under the moonlight was, along with the day of our wedding, the happiest memory I could possibly have.
Then, a few months ago, when I was still a little ways from my 30th birthday, my life started to fall apart.
At first people would look at me and ask why I was different – my friends, my co-workers, my mother even. I hadn't done anything with my hair, or clothes, or nails – I was the same old Hannah, consistently using the same haircut and general style for over five years.
"I think I misremembered how you look, then", people would usually say, and I'd leave at that, the horrible uneasiness and panic I felt that day all those years ago crawling its way up, bitter and burning like bile, but so much worse.
"Who are you again?" my boss asked, and my face burned in shame. I knew that I am very average-looking, and that he only came to the office around once a month, but I had been there for the past three years. He called by the name many times.
I managed to laugh it off like he was making a weird joke out of the blue. "It's Hannah Davis, sir", I replied meekly.
"I think I recognize you, but I can't remember why", a woman my age with auburn hair approached me in the subway.
She had been my best friend on high school.
***
When things progressed to the point where I lost my job because no one knew who I was – not even the face recognition system of the building I worked at –, I was miserable.
But I still had Dylan. Dylan still remembered me, although he sometimes looked at me with a spark of unfamiliarity on his eyes, like I had undergone so many plastic surgeries that he simply wasn't sure if I was actually me anymore.
Despite that, he still remembered me. It was all that mattered – we struggled financially, but at least his job was enough to pay the basic bills.
I tried getting a job where no one gives a fuck, but by the end of the month I realized that, even though my co-workers at Walmart had accepted my unfamiliar presence without questions, I wasn't on the payroll.
I was forgotten in every possible way. Nothing brought me more despair than saying something like "I was here yesterday, remember?" and being answered no.
I started frantically looking for the old lady. If she could see it coming, then maybe she knew how to get rid of it.
No luck. I spent days near the coffee shop where I had met her, but I never saw her; the only progress I made around that time was finally connecting the dots and realizing that my mother was "unknown" because she had suffered from the same fate I was suffering.
Maybe she still existed, but with no records of it, either legal or sentimental, how would I find her? Was she actively looking for me while I could still be found? What would happen if two forgotten people were reunited?
But soon I realized that my mother was surely long gone. No one could live like this for over 30 years.
Whenever my husband wasn't at work, he was with me, memorizing every inch of my face, or doing his best to.
Because he started to forget me too.
At first, only in lapses. He'd remember me again, although his eyes didn't gleam with love like before, because you can't just love a half-stranger.
I took so many pictures of myself, but my social media accounts couldn't be seen by others, like I was shadow banned. I was shadow banned from life.
I couldn't even go to the supermarket because people complained that I wasn't there before so I was cutting in line. Small inconveniences became heart-wrenching situations for what they meant, and I finally understood what the old lady meant.
I was being erased alive.
***
The worst moment of my life was when Dylan finally forgot completely about me. I was showering when he came home from work.
"Whoa! What are you doing here, lady?"
He calmly said I should get dressed and leave, or he would call the police. I cried, my ugly sobs making my whole body shake, and my husband – always an angel – felt sorry for me and tried to calm me down, even though I was a complete stranger.
When I finally managed to talk I explained everything to him with such abandon that he believed me.
Dylan – God bless his beautiful heart – got himself a lot of tattoos to remind him of me. My face, my name, what I meant to him, all carved in his skin in an attempt to transcend of at least trick my curse.
But as soon as he forgot me again, the tattoos were rendered useless, turned into mere random images, none of which referred to me.
My only solace was that every day Dylan fell in love with me again; but such a superficial, fleeting feeling wasn't enough; I craved the deepness of his former love, and even though I never said it, he felt guilty. He slowly started sinking into madness too.
I considered leaving so I'd be the only one to suffer.
"I can't bear the idea of you not being there, you know?" he replied, when I told him this plan. "Every time I forget about you I feel so despaired. Like someone took off all my organs and filled the empty shell with clay".
I couldn't. I wouldn't.
Back then, leaving his sight for five minutes was enough to be forgotten. He came up with a plan, although he only let me know the second half of it when it was too late.
"Hannah, I want you to use this to our favor for once", he cupped my face on his hands; these days he held me with such desperation, like I was going to fade any time. "We need to rob some money."
I did it. Under the veil of forgetfulness, I put on a mask, held the poor bank teller at gun point and escaped.
It was the only time I was happy that no one remembered me; still, I felt awful and vomited in the curb as soon as I made my escape.
It wasn't a lot of money. It was probably enough to live for a year without having to worry.
"What now?" I asked Dylan when I came home, and of course he had already forgotten me. My heart broke from seeing the empty look on his eyes, trying to draw a distant, corroded memory.
I could now recite our story by heart, having told him it so many times. When he finally managed to remember me, he held me in his arms. "I'll quit my job. Let's stay together for how long we have".
Such beautiful words. Such a beautiful angel. But it was getting easier and easier to forget me – now he couldn't even go pee without me. One minute out of his sight was enough to erase the fact that I existed and who I was.
Dylan spent his days watching me and notes of his future plans, being very careful not to mention me so they wouldn't be erased.
Then came April 25. My birthday.
And the day that Dylan started to forget about me as soon as he blinked. It was a hell of a day, and by the end of it, through tears and confusion, he put me to sleep in the bedroom and took the living room couch for himself, afraid he would disturb me every time he forgot why I was there with him.
He took it as a personal matter, like the problem was his inability to remember me enough.
That's the only explanation for what he did.
When I woke up the next day, I was handcuffed to him. He was sitting by the bedside, staring at me intently.
I screamed.
"If a blink was enough to make me forget you, then I'll never blink again", he announced, the raw meat above his eyeballs glistening, sickly and pink.
Dylan had removed his eyelids to never forget me again.
I cried. While it was heartwarming that he would go for such lengths for me, the vision of his unblinking mutilated eyes was creepy at best.
He didn't last long, of course. The infection from the homemade surgery and the fact that he couldn't properly sleep made him fade fast. By the end, he couldn't stop repeating my name, like it was one last prayer to save his soul.
He died two days ago. I know that eventually his family and friends will notice he disappeared, but there's nothing they can do, because they won't even know who I am. And even if they did, I don't think it will be an issue.
Even in death, his wide eyeballs are still directed at me; before they decay, I wanted to try one last time to show the world that I am here, that I ever existed.
I know you'll forget this story as soon as you read it. I know it will be swallowed by the others and then disappear.
But if you could just make an effort and really put your mind into it – for my suffering, for my mother, for Dylan.
Remember me.

Posted by u/poloniumpoisoning