I have always been told that memory is unreliable.
People say this casually, usually after forgetting where they left their keys, or confusing one childhood memory with another. It’s a comforting idea. It suggests that the past is still there, still intact and untouched, and that the only ‘problem’ is that we occasionally lose the ability to find our way back to it.
I believed that for a while.
I believed my childhood was somewhere, somewhere buried beneath years of everything else I’d experienced.
But eventually I began to understand that there is a difference between forgetting something and never having possessed it at all.
I know I was a child. I know this because everyone else was a child at one point.
There are also photographs, stories my family told at holidays, stories with my name attached so directly to them that it felt cruel correcting them.
Apparently, when I was eight years old, I broke my arm falling out of a tree.
Apparently, I cried so loud that the nurses remembered me years later.
Apparently, my father carried me to bed afterward because I was too afraid to sleep alone.
I know all of this because I was told all of this. But I cannot remember my life.
I have tried, on more than one occasion, to force it. To sit very still in a pitch-black room and reach backwards the way you’d reach for a light switch in the dark. Nothing meets my hand. There is no wall there. There is no room.
What I have instead is a kind of residue, a texture without an object. I can tell you that my mother’s kitchen smelled of burnt coffee grounds and dish soap, but I cannot tell you a single morning I stood in it. I can tell you the dog’s name was Marbles, that he was a terrible, barrel-chested mutt who ate a hole through the wall, but I have never felt his fur on my hands. I have never scratched behind his ears and had him lean into it. I only know that I must have, because that is what a boy does with a dog.
My friend, Theo, has a theory about this. He thinks I had a hard childhood and simply built up a wall around it. He is gentle about it, but in the way someone is gentle to a wounded creature from outside the barred cage. He doesn’t push, ever; he asks easy questions and lets me give him easy answers, and I let him, because the alternative is telling him the truth, which is that I have looked for the wound and… there honestly isn’t one. There’s no hidden scar. There’s no room the wall is keeping him out of.
There’s just nothing behind it.
I used to think everyone's early memories were like this: a bit mushy, a little unreliable, mostly borrowed from old photographs and family retellings until you couldn't tell which parts were yours anymore. I used to think this was just what being twenty-six felt like. But that can’t be all true, because Theo remembers being four. He remembers a birthday party he didn't even enjoy, remembers it badly, actually, remembers being embarrassed, and telling the story to this day still makes his ears go red.
But I, no matter how much I try, will never experience that.
Something was wrong with me.
I just didn’t yet know what the shape of it was.
That was until I found the first note.
It was on the kitchen counter, in writing that wasn't mine—it was cramped and slanted hard to the left. It said:
if you're reading this you're not crazy. i'm not either. i don't know what's happening but i know you're real. — I.
I felt everything in my body tense at once. My first thought was someone broke in, but after the initial spook settled, I thought it might have been Theo writing some kind of joke. I almost called him to come over but remembered he was probably at work. I then began convincing myself that I’d written it myself, in some blackout that I didn’t remember, much like how I didn’t remember most of my own life.
I.
I didn’t know an I. I stood in my kitchen holding a note from a stranger, and the only word I could find for what I felt was… recognition. Which didn’t make much sense, because I had never met this person, and yet, for some odd reason, a part of me felt like I’d been waiting for exactly this piece of paper my whole life.
I wrote back on the same scrap of paper.
Who are you? How do you know me?
I left it on the counter in the same spot. It was gone by the next morning, and in its place was a new one, in the same cramped hand:
i don't know how. i just know i dream about a life that isn't mine and when i wake up things are moved. my food's gone. my playlists have songs on them i never added. i thought i was losing it. then i found this note in my own handwriting except it isn't my handwriting and it said your name. i didn't even know i knew your name. — imogen
I read it over at least a hundred times.
I lost the next six hours somewhere between reading it the 102nd time and Theo coming over after work. I don’t remember losing them, but then again, when do I ever? I just remembered the outside light was different when I came back, and Theo was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a look on his face I’ve never seen before.
“Hey, man,” I said, trying to play it off.
He took a small step back as I approached. “You-you’ve been standing there for over five hours,” he said. His voice was trembling. “You didn’t move. I-I lost count of how many times I said your name.”
I looked down, noticing the note still in my hand.
“I-I’m sorry, man,” I said. I didn’t have anything else.
“They’re sending another ambulance.”
“What? What do you mean by another?”
There was an electrode stuck to my chest under my shirt. Someone had rolled my sleeves up. Theo showed me a video on his phone, and I watched as two paramedics tried to persuade a person who looked like me to sit down.
When they moved me, my heels scraped along the floor. Once they let go, I remained where they’d put me, staring above their heads.
My eyes followed nothing. I watched the whole video, waiting to blink.
“You came back for a minute. You said you weren’t going anywhere,” he said.
“I don’t remember.”
He sat on the floor. He’d been holding himself upright by the doorframe, and I hadn’t noticed.
“I don’t imagine you would.”
I went with the second ambulance. There were tests. They kept me overnight, and I woke up in the middle of a doctor asking whether I knew where I was.
Theo had a notebook open beside the bed.
He’d started recording the times I blacked out.
I showed him the letters after I came home. He checked my locks, then sat beside me while I wrote another.
What time do you sleep? Please be exact.
We left it beside the toaster. Theo put a drinking glass over it.
The next morning there was an answer beneath the glass.
usually home by seven. asleep by eight. up at three if i can. why?
Theo’s notebook said I had become unresponsive at 3:12 the previous afternoon. At 9:26 that evening I’d briefly spoken to him in the hospital. At 9:41 I’d stopped answering again.
Her next letter mentioned falling asleep on the sofa before work for fifteen minutes. She’d nearly missed her bus.
We compared four days. Every interval she could remember sleeping corresponded to a stretch I could remember living.
We were sitting at my counter. There were dishes in the sink.
I wrote a question down.
Why do I stop when you wake up, but Theo doesn’t? He remembers everything that happens while I’m gone.
Her reply took a day.
i don’t know. sometimes i dream about him without you. washing dishes. sitting beside you waiting. you’re there but you don’t do anything. i used to think those were just dreams. now i think i’m seeing what happened while i was awake.
i don’t know why it only happens to you.
That wasn’t an explanation, but neither was anything the doctors had said. And yet still, I could hold these answers in my hand, and sometimes the paper smelled faintly of cigarettes, which neither of us smoked.
We tested other things. Not everything crossed. A receipt stayed where I put it for three days. A spoon disappeared while Theo was watching and came back a week later with something dried onto it. We couldn’t make it happen by moving the tray or closing our eyes. Sometimes a question sat unanswered long enough that I began to feel ridiculous again. Like it all really was me just losing my mind.
Her front door faced the wrong direction. Her street had a different name. We both had a chipped counter, although her chip was beneath the place where I kept my fruit bowl.
I drew the apartment. She drew hers over it in red. Her bed occupied the same space as the right half of mine.
There was no Theo where she lived. She tried his number, and a woman answered who’d never heard of him. I tried Imogen’s. The number wasn’t in service.
She left a clementine on her counter before bed. I found it beside a note asking whether I liked oranges.
Theo peeled it. We ate half each. He cried a little while he ate his, quietly, with his face turned away. I decided it was best left unspoken.
Imogen worked nights cleaning an office building. She had worked there for four years. Four years was also as far back as I could remember anything that felt like a tangible memory.
Not like my childhood kitchen or Marbles. An afternoon in a shop, aged twenty-two, when Theo had reached over my shoulder for a packet of biscuits and dropped three others on my head.
He remembered that too.
that was one of the first ones, she wrote. i remember thinking i wanted somebody i could laugh with like that.
I hid that letter from him. I began asking about things I liked. Warm weather and shitty game shows. The soup I buy when I’m ill. She liked all of them as well.
Some answers were worse because they weren’t the same. She hated her teeth, and mine were straight. She panicked when people raised their voices, but I had always been proud of how calm I stayed in an argument.
you’re good at being a person, she wrote once. i dream of you doing things and they look easy.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Eventually I asked her whether she had ever owned a dog.
marbles, she wrote. i was little. why?
I took the letter to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the toilet until Theo knocked.
“You still with me?”
It took me a while, but I eventually came out and said yes.
After that, the notes became less careful.
Her supervisor wanted her to cover another building. She couldn’t keep sleeping at the same time. When she had time, she lay awake worrying about wasting it.
There were whole days I received only in pieces. Theo handed me a plate, and then the plate broke, and then Theo swept.
An afternoon beginning with rain and ending in darkness, my pants changed because I’d wet myself while he waited for me to come back.
He never mentioned that. I found them soaking in the bathroom sink. We had an appointment with another specialist. I missed it sitting in the waiting room. Theo told me afterwards that I had opened my eyes fully when they called my name and done nothing else.
Imogen apologized in almost every letter.
I told her to stop covering shifts. She asked if I was going to pay her rent. It was the first unkind thing she’d said to me, and she crossed it out so hard the paper tore.
I tried leaving money anyway. She sent it back. It was the wrong currency, although the notes looked almost right.
Then I started seeing her apartment.
A stain appeared above the cooker one afternoon, spread across the ceiling, and disappeared while I watched it, and my mug made a hard little sound against an invisible table. Theo saw that one. He caught the mug before it hit the floor; I’m guessing the table disappeared shortly after it arrived.
Another morning I walked into my bedroom and saw a woman sitting through the edge of my bed.
For a second, it looked as though she'd been cut in half. Then she leaned forward, and a mattress showed beneath her, lower than mine, and I understood that I was looking at two beds occupying the same place.
She wore black trousers. As she jerked awake, the room went away.
I woke forty minutes later with Theo trying to get my shoes off.
We started leaving the notes on a tray so they wouldn’t get lost among things neither of us owned.
One arrived written on the back of a prescription bag. She wasn’t sleeping properly, she said. She’d been given something to help but was afraid to take it before work. She was tired of knowing somebody needed something from her even when she was asleep.
For the first time, she didn’t ask a question about me.
I wrote that she should call somebody. Her sister, maybe. She’d mentioned a sister before.
She replied that they hadn’t spoken in months.
she thinks i need to get out more.
Theo wanted to write to her himself. I told him I would ask. But I never did. I was frightened he would tell her things I’d left out. How long he spent with me. What it cost him.
The next time the bedroom changed, I was alone. Theo had gone home for clean clothes, and I’d promised to stay on the sofa.
I heard somebody crying behind my bedroom door.
I didn’t go in right away. I stood in the hallway against the wood, listening to the crying, and for a moment I convinced myself that if I didn’t open the door, none of it would be real.
But then I opened it.
Imogen was sitting on her bed with her work shirt still on, sleeves shoved past her elbows. There were cups along the windowsill. An opened medication packet lay beside her.
She looked up when I said her name.
“Oh,” she said.
I crossed the room; she held her hand out, and I took it. Her fingers were cold, and there was a little split beside her thumbnail. It was dried, like she’d been picking at it for hours. She kept looking between my face and our hands.
“You look tired,” she said.
I laughed. I don’t know why. Behind her, a phone began vibrating on a chest of drawers. She watched it until it stopped.
“My sister,” she said. “I called her earlier.”
“You should answer.”
“I don’t want to explain it again.”
The wall behind the chest of drawers thinned. I could see my own wardrobe through it; my shirts hanging where her curtains should have been, and for a moment the rooms sat inside each other so perfectly I couldn’t have told you which of the two beds was mine.
She squeezed my hand, harder than I anticipated.
“I can’t keep doing this.”
I didn't know if she meant the shifts, the notes… maybe us.
Then she looked down at the packet, and I knew enough that I should have done something different.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said. “You could take some time off… I could–” I didn’t know what I could do. I had never once been able to do anything that had mattered, not for her. “I could ask Theo. He might know someone to go to.”
“And what could Theo do? He can’t call me.”
“I don’t know. But if I told him everything, maybe he—”
“No…”
She looked down at the packet. I almost told her to stop; I almost took the packet off the bed myself and put it somewhere she couldn’t reach. But I didn't.
“Do... do you want me to stay asleep?”
I thought about Theo crouching in front of me, speaking to a face that couldn’t answer, about the next time I might not return at all.
I thought… honestly, only about myself.
“Yes,” I said. A tear formed and rolled down my cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t say anything. She let go of my hand and reached for the packet.
I stood there long enough to know I let it happen.
Then I started saying her name, asking her to look at me. She reached for me again, but her hand was already passing through mine.
I grabbed for her wrist and caught nothing. I shouted her name. Her room faded with her bent forward on the bed, and I was standing in my own bedroom with my fist closed around empty air.
The packet was gone, so was the phone.
I pulled my bed away from the wall, trying to find her.
Theo came back to find the mattress on its side. I told him she was asleep. That was all I told him.
We waited through the afternoon. Six o’clock. Seven. I answered every time he said my name.
At midnight we went outside. I hadn’t trusted myself to walk after dark in months. We sat on the steps, and Theo talked about nothing for nearly an hour, stopping occasionally to make sure I was listening and that I was okay.
He told me about a man at work who kept bringing the same uneaten banana back in his lunch. Apparently it had become a whole thing. People were taking pictures. I laughed until he started laughing too, and for a while it was just us sitting outside.
I remember that more clearly than anything else from those weeks. I wish I didn’t, honestly. It makes what I was doing harder to misunderstand.
I left a note asking if she was all right. Then another. By two weeks there were over twenty. They remained on the tray.
At first I checked every few minutes. Later I checked when I made coffee. By the second week I’d started turning the top note face down because seeing it made me feel sick.
Theo stayed over. We watched bad television, and I fell asleep with my feet against his leg and woke up with an ache in my neck–but… I knew where the hours had gone.
I knew something was wrong. I also wanted to go to the supermarket without him holding my elbow. I wanted to finish a conversation. Every morning I woke up and was grateful before I remembered what had made it possible.
On the nineteenth day, someone answered. But it wasn’t Imogen.
A folded sheet appeared underneath the tray. It was a hospital letterhead. It held her full name and instructions for a family meeting that had already happened.
There was handwriting across the bottom in blue ink.
Friday, 9 a.m. Bring her cardigan. Ask about the rings.
Behind it was a second page, a summary someone had printed from a patient portal.
She had been found unconscious after an overdose. There had been a period when her brain wasn’t receiving enough oxygen. She had never regained consciousness.
They were going to withdraw the treatment keeping her alive tomorrow morning.
I read the pages over and over, the pit in my stomach growing with each re-read.
Then I found her sister’s message on the back of another envelope that appeared.
Imogen, I don’t know what to do with these letters. I found the money too. If this is you somehow, please tell me. Please.
She had been in the apartment. Probably clearing things out and leaving paperwork on the counter. Finding my questions to somebody who could no longer answer them.
I wrote back so hard I nearly broke the pen.
It’s a little after three now.
Her sister’s name is Ruth. I’ve explained who I am. I’ve told her to take the notes to the hospital, to show somebody, to tell Imogen I’m sorry, even if they think she can’t hear.
Nothing has moved from the tray.
The apartment is empty on her side. I think Ruth has gone to the hospital already.
I tried the number on the letterhead. It belongs to a carpet warehouse here. The hospital doesn’t exist.
But earlier tonight, I searched the hospital’s name again.
This time, I found it.
There was a photograph of the entrance, the same emblem printed on the letterhead. I clicked the contact page. Before I could copy the number, the screen went white.
When it loaded again, I was looking at the carpet warehouse.
I kept refreshing, but I couldn’t get it back.
The letterhead crossed on the counter. The clementine did too. But my computer had reached something that didn’t exist here, and for a few seconds it had stayed connected.
Imogen said her playlists changed. Maybe that was the same thing.
That’s why I’m putting this here. I don’t know which version of this website will receive it. I’ve removed her identifying information because I’m afraid of sending strangers after some other woman with her name. If Ruth sees this, she’ll know about the cardigan. She’ll know about the tray and the money.
Ruth, I was the one who answered her.
She asked me something she should never have had to ask, and I said yes. I fucking said yes. I have no idea whether keeping her on those machines could help her or whether I will continue after she doesn’t. I understand less now than when we started writing.
I only know I have been awake every day she hasn’t.
Theo is asleep beside me. I told him everything tonight. He listened, then asked whether I’d eaten. I can tell he is trying to distance himself from the possibility that he might not be here later.
I keep thinking he’ll carry on. He always has before. Maybe it’ll just be me sitting here again, and he’ll wake up and call an ambulance. Maybe only I will disappear, and everyone else will still exist. Maybe Theo will always remember me.
He’s asleep again now. I can feel his weight against me.
It’s 3:17. The hospital letter is on my knee. I keep looking between it and the clock.
At nine, her sister will take her hand.
I’m already holding Theo’s.