Before the World Forgot Me

Memory

I collected the coffee anyway. I was the only one at the counter. She looked at me like I might be confused about who the drink belonged to. I took it anyway and sat at my table. The coffee was fine. It tasted like every cappuccino I'd ever had from this place. The croissant was warm and buttery. My mouth knew the taste. My body responded to the caffeine. Everything was as it should be, except that no one knew I was here.

I pulled out the notebook.

"Friday, 2:34 PM. Back at Rosario's. Different barista. She doesn't know me either. Or Marcus is gone. Or I'm being erased. Or I was never there in the first place."

That last line bothered me as soon as I wrote it. Because what if that was true? What if I had never actually been to Rosario's at all? What if I was confabulating the entire history of Wednesday mornings and cappuccinos? What if the human brain, bored with the reality of my life, had invented a fictional routine and I'd been living in that fiction?

No. That didn't make sense. I had receipts. I had credit card statements. I had evidence of the transactions. Physical proof that I'd been buying coffee from this place.

Didn't I?

I pulled up my bank statement on my phone. I scrolled through the recent transactions. There were charges from Rosario's. Dozens of them. Spread across months and months. Seven dollars and fifty cents, recurring. Evidence of my existence packaged as a spending pattern.

But the dates were wrong.

No, that wasn't right. The dates were fine. I was reading them wrong. My eyes were tired. I was tired. Everything was fine.

The woman at the counter was looking at me. I noticed her because she was looking away from her register. She was watching me with a kind of concern. Like someone observing an animal that might be sick. I looked down at my phone. I put it away. I drank my coffee and tried to become invisible enough to stop being watched.

When I left, I made sure to walk slowly. To move like a normal person. To not do anything that might draw more attention to myself. The bell above the door chimed as I left. It was a nice bell. I'd always liked that bell.

Saturday morning, I woke up and realized I couldn't remember Mara's apartment number.

This seems like a small thing. A minor detail. But I've been to her apartment approximately three hundred times. Maybe more. We've been friends for eight years. Her apartment is where I go when I need to be somewhere that isn't my apartment. It's where I've spent countless evenings watching television and drinking wine and having the kind of conversations that supposedly matter but which we never reference afterward.

I know her apartment number. I know it the way you know your own phone number. It's hardwired into my memory. It's muscle memory for my fingers dialing.

Except I couldn't remember it.

I scrolled through my phone to find it. There was no saved contact for her apartment. Strange. I would have saved it. I must have saved it at some point. I called her.

"Hey," she said. She sounded distant. Not geographically distant. Emotionally distant. Like she was present but only barely.

"What's your apartment number?" I asked.

"Why?"

"I forgot. I'm going to come over later."

There was a pause. The kind of pause that contains multiple conversations happening simultaneously in the person's brain.

"Four-seventeen," she said finally. "Are we... did we make plans?"

"No. I just wanted to come by. If that's okay."

"Um. Yeah. I guess. I'm pretty tired though. I was planning to just stay in."

"That's fine. I can just hang out."

Another pause. "Okay. Let yourself in."

I hung up and added the information to my phone. Four-seventeen. I wrote it in the notebook too. "Mara's apartment. 417. I forgot and had to ask her. How many other details about my life have I misplaced without realizing it? How much of my life exists only in my head, in versions that might not be accurate?"

I went to her apartment that evening. The building was familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously. Like I was seeing it for the first time and the hundredth time at the same moment. I climbed the stairs. Found 417. Knocked.

Mara answered the door. She was wearing pajamas. Her hair was unwashed. She looked like someone who'd been crying recently, though there were no fresh tears on her face. She was Mara and also a stranger wearing Mara's face.

"Hi," she said. She didn't kiss me hello. She didn't hug me. She just stepped aside so I could enter.

Her apartment was exactly as I remembered it. Exactly as it should have been. The couch. The bookshelves. The kitchen with the broken dishwasher. Everything in its place. Everything confirming that my memory was accurate. That I had been here before. That this space was familiar to me.

But Mara was not acting like I was familiar to her.

"How long have we known each other?" I asked.

"What?" She looked confused. "Eight years. Why?"

"Just checking," I said.