Dear You,
I can’t remember you,
the version of me I hear so much about. They speak of you as if mentioning your name could call you back, but I know you are gone.
It happened without warning. One moment, my mind was yours, the next, we were drowning in darkness. A seizure, they told me, a violent rush of nothing, and with it came hypoxia, the suffocating absence of air that stole my memory. When I woke, the world was unfamiliar, and so was I.
They call it amnesia, a word that feels clinical, indifferent, incapable of carrying the weight of twenty-six years erased in an instant. The memories, the moments, the very essence of who I was, were taken from me without warning. I try to reach for those moments, the ones I should know, but all I grasp is air. And in this forgetting, I am misunderstood.
To others, I am still the person who existed before, but to me, I am an unfamiliar stranger wearing your face. They tell me, as if it’s simple, “You were this. You were that.” But they don’t understand, the girl they remember doesn’t exist anymore, and every attempt to make me her only builds a wall between what I am now.
People wonder what it is like, to lose not just a moment, but an entire life. But I do not know. I did not choose to lose myself. I wish they understood how it feels to be seen as someone you cannot be. There is a profound misunderstanding between us. They look at me, and they see you.
Twenty-six years of moments, laughter, heartbreak, lessons, all of it swept away by time and trauma. And in its place, I stand, piecing together an identity from the remnants you left behind. Maybe I was always meant to start again, not as a replacement for you, but as someone emerging from the absence you left, reconstructing a self that is fully mine, someone who can stand in the space between who you were and who I will become.
So, to you, the girl I cannot remember, I will not mourn you as a loss, nor will I replicate the memories of your life. Instead, I will design a path forward, not defined by what was lost, but by what I choose to build in its place. I will honor you by living, not in the shadow of who you were, but as someone worth remembering.
Sincerely,
The me who now stands where you once were