PROLOGUE
Markus sighed, and that very action was enough to release the simple thoughts of happiness into the air, where they, without a home, unfolded and annihilated the rest of his day.
He had learned the hard way that the trick to happiness, was to allow it to creep into your life and let it sit there in the places of grey, unrecognised in its existence. Protected in the corners of comfort.
In the retrospect and experience of life Markus had noted that the times he was most happy were the times when he did not really realise it. After, when things went to shit, he would look back in wonder at this simple consoling time in his life. He would hold on to the sweetness of the memories and they would buoy him through any tough times that followed.
But he also had figured out, that somehow when he became aware of those feeling of happiness, when it sneaked into his mind, for even just a milli-second, it was in that exact moment that the intense blissfulness, which delicately sat beneath his very world, would begin to unravel.
He still could not quite figure out why it would all spiral unexpectedly. Beyond his grasp. He wondered if a sudden pressure to hold the happiness was applied and so with the pressure, everything was destined from then on to entirely tear at the seams. Now, he realised, unhappily, as the thoughts of happiness drift around him, that he was on borrowed time until it would all come crashing down again.
Markus
Unfortunately, Markus only had the last two years of experience to count for. Within those two years there is very little he can remember, aside from the minutes running up to the event that caused all the other events in life, to be fundamentally and entirely wiped from his mind.
So, Markus’ views were predominantly based on that singular event. He had built other memories over the last six months and they only assisted in shaping, his now, terribly negative opinion of the world. And his struggle to hold on to these precious few moments made him fear for his future at any time and in any place. So the path laid in front of him had become something ominous and terrifying, just like his path laid behind him. Markus could only sit in the shivering light of the present wondering how it had all come to be and fearing what was all to come.
He was forty-two years old. Or so he had been told, on the day he woke up, two years previous, and entered the world once again. The doctors and the people who claimed to be his family and loved ones all nodded in agreement at this fact and he believed them, because there was no reason not to. There was no alternative to believing.
Markus tried to figure out, whether it had been more of a waste to spend his early forties in rehabilitation or to lose the memories of everything that happened before that. From what he had figured, from the last six months, was that the world was a pretty shitty place. Where people let you down and where you let others down.
He saw how promises were made and then broken; he saw how people struggled to express themselves, while others tried everything to get someone to listen and were met only with a deafening silence. He saw the dishevelment of existence, in what he perceived as no existence at all, but rather a monotonous repeat of a living nightmare.
Markus, a grown man, looked at the world for the first time. There was no childhood innocence to soften the first impressions of reality. He may have lost his memories – but his understanding of human nature was tainted with some deeper knowledge or wisdom settled deep within himself.
#1 Thursday
When I look around, what I see is people who understand things I cannot
I beg of you find me a person who knows what this emptiness is like? What must it be to have a mind filled with memories. With wonderful moments you can pull up and dance with on a lonely night? What must it be to turn to the memory of tragedy when you need to grieve. When you need to feel. When you need to remember. Or just to contemplate. Do they sit and think about the things that were wonderful, the things they have done that made them great, do they remember those that made them terrible? Weak or vulnerable? Do they go to happy or sad places? Do their memories make any difference at all?
Perhaps they offer a cushion. A delicate platter to catch their fall. Or maybe they too float in an empty space of disconnection, within a past that is real and not real all the time.
Maybe they too want to scream at you to help them know how to understand.
Perhaps they dream of the future, look to all the things they hope they can recover for, unlike me they can remember the dreams, the hopes, the delicate wishes kissed in the night-air. They can remember the sense of delight, the beautiful glint of desire and wistfulness in a partners eyes, they can remember the future they were living for and now they can recover for. Perhaps they dream of righting the wrongs they made in the past, of somehow reliving an eternity of sorrow and extracting all that made it sorrowful. Subtracting the reality with the hypothetical. Does their experiences, does the cushion of memories allow them to float upon a cloud and allow them to dance buoyant? Or do they, instead, pull them to the underground with misery and despair?
But what do I know doctor? I don’t remember anything.
What do I see? What do I feel? No, how do I feel? What do I remember? What do I understand? No…HOW do I understand? At least that is what I wanted to say when they asked me about what I understand. I have a question to retort. An exclamation to make. I have an appeal !!! HOW THE FUCK DO I (?) UNDERSTAND??!!!!
It is so fucked up!
I walk the corridors. I spend the minutes, moments, seconds. The endlessness of these days walking the corridors. All I see is something called people. People who are lost somewhere. lLost somewhere others can never be. Looking from windows. Absorbed by memories or dreams, where they have fallen into something beyond any grasp. Perhaps it is the past that has consumed them. What lay in the secrets of their past? What exists in their memory? What does it feel like to know and remember your life?
Do they have memories? Do they know how lucky they are if they do? I think about the past, I try to understand it, but I can’t. It is a black hole of emptiness. It is a void. I am stuck in the abyss. Where I know things should exist but when I reach forward, towards them, they disintegrate. Can you imagine that. It’s life the fading of a dream. The more you search. The more you lose. They become even blacker than they were. How is that even possible?
But what do I know doctor? I don't remember anything.
#2 Sunday
It’s stupid to write. I am tired, I am tired thinking and watching and not remembering….how do I remember this? How do I remember to put pen on paper? Maybe that is why they are pushing me, encouraging me to write each day. Maybe it will somehow help?
Today I felt a camaraderie with these beings that have somehow become the eternal shadows of my day. It is Sunday and I saw them look, when they thought no one was watching. Expectedly towards the door. I saw the click of their minds as they reconciled that life is busy, as they calculated all the number of reasons their loved ones did not come that day. Searching their past themselves to find a reason. A reason where they were to blame for the absence of their loved one today. Or a reason to allow them the release from personal accusation. After all it could be any number of things. Completely disconnected to a fact that they had become burdensome. That they had become boring. A drain too deadening on a life that still desired to exist.
And this is what horrifies me Doctor. HOW is it possible that I remember the torturous facts of life? How does intuition well inside me, when my memories have evaporated??
This makes me sad to write about.
But I have a question. One that burns in me as I sit no longer a part of the world.
How did I deal with humanity before?
How did I tolerate people? I probably was one. I probably was one that didn’t have time to visit. And that is hard to sit with.
In the yellow lighting of the hallways. in the bitter blast of this fluorescent light you beam on us in the communal rooms. In the dismal corners of the square foot rooms what I see is a lack of interaction. What I see is separation and loneliness. Do you know, Doctor, that some of your patients have spent more than six weeks, without doing more than nodding their head to the man they pass in the hallway five times a day? They have not shared more than a crumb of small talk with the man they sleep alongside each and every night?
This is what I see Doctor. Something I do not have words for. I see fear, a fear to make new friends in case they woke up that day and the sheets on the bed next to them are pulled over a threatening shape. Or a fear of watching their companion getting better, slipping on his coat and waving as he went out to continue his life. Fulfilling his dreams until then he too would never visit again. Becoming like the shadows of the rest of the world and merging into a distant step. A once upon a time reality. A hope, yet another one to cause further pain and suffering.
I see the looks, Doctor. sometimes of fear. Fear for death. Fear for loss. Sometimes even fear to hope.
Afraid somehow that it was contagious, that they could catch it and feel for a single moment anything but indifference to the miserable state around them?
#3 SAturday
When people look at me I think it is sadness they find lurking beneath the film of my eyes, I see it reflected in their pitying stares, in their sideways glances and in their blatant condensation – their patronising nods.
But mostly I see it because I feel it too. The over-whelming sadness invades me like a contagion. And I sigh in exasperation. I don’t know how it got there.
How is it, Doctor, that I am sad for a life I do not remember? It is simple.. This is what I am learning doc. Our emotions. Our feelings. The warmth of our past. The coldness of our experiences. Cruelty attached to words and events and everything else that we hear see or feel resides outside our memories. In some deeper part of ourselves. Protected from the delicacies of the human brain and its’ capabilities or perhaps its’ limitations.
This is what I am learning. I am learning that I must suffer my emotions even though I have not remembered a single thing, not one singular event. I have discovered that my memories were photographs held in my mind, there for me to conjure up when all was well with the world. When all was well with my head. But our understandings and our emotions, ourselves and everything else that stemmed from those moments in our lives are stored within our hearts. Or in the very essence of ourself. In a place that some may call a soul. In the enchanting element that makes us more than vessels, the thing we call our mind, even though we do not know of where it exists: they seep from your pores, they exist in a place both outside and yet inside the physical body.
Do you see that Doc? I bet you didn't know I could be that insightful. Me, stupid, with all my memory gone.
Was I religious? I don’t remember. But I don’t think so. I cannot imagine holding tight to these fantastical images you have shown me. But still I know, without religion, without the memories of my experiences that this place that held on to emotions and understandings was infinite. Existing outside of time and outside of space. In doing so they haunt me more than any of the other ghosts. They are the ghosts without a face.
Is this what you want from me?
Are these revelations the things that are going to place me on the road to some kind of retribution? A first step to building my broken head. I don’t think so. I think this is your way of forcing me to expose my soul. Expose my fears, laying them bare for you to thrill over. For you to write research papers on. For you to draw some more letters after your name
For you to validate yourself.
The story of what happened to Markus is both simple and intricate, it is a step of bad luck and utter improbability all rolled into one.
Markus’ head had been broken so badly that every event in his life had seeped through the crack. Yet his heart held the great sadness of loss, within her very corners. She beat it through Markus’ veins and pumped it around his entire body.
Markus knew that his heart was broken too, even if the doctors said that it was strong and healthy. He felt the shards of the sharp edges dig into him every time he breathed. Sometimes he felt it stop and miss three or four beats. He felt infection seep in through the seams and blacken the insides. Making it pound hard. Making it crumble again and again.
In truth, of all the broken hearts you could ever have, Markus has the worst kind of broken heart. His was broken without his remembering why.. He had to find a way to heal it without the float of beautiful memories to cushion his fall.
He had to hold his understanding in the deepest corners of himself. without knowing why or how they had ever come to be. He held them without logic or rational. He held them without the soft edges to protect his bitterness or the reason to control the ecstatic devastating love.
Hours passed and turned into weeks, the weeks eventually became months.
Without the support of coherence and situation and consequences and everything else which allows us deal with the emotions that fly around us, Markus somehow fell between the cracks and became just as those around him; aloof, afraid, disconnected, lost and abandoned.
Anyone who visited, would, of course, have considered it inevitable. Loneliness was a poison that spread fast. And in here loneliness haunted them all, like a poltergeist, and leeched on anyone with a distant thought.
Searching through the fogged-up window, facing the streets below with bumper-to-bumper traffic, with busy people, with lives like he once had, Markus did not allow himself to dwell on these little details.
Instead his thoughts looked inwards, towards his broken heart and he became more and more lost as isolation impended. Loneliness saw its opportunity and quietly nestled beside him; the presence, although invisible, loomed over him with ominous threat.
It was like a shadow lurking in the periphery of his life that grew every day until it became central, until it became the core of his existence. And just like a troublesome ghost disturbing the equilibrium of a family home, Markus was at a loss as to how to remove it or know if it was ever really there.
It did not take long for thoughts of darkness and hopelessness to fill his day and eventually fill his mind. Until finally they came to define him more than any of the things. They defined him more than what the others insisted were the “real” Markus, or at least the Markus he used to be.
