Before the World Forgot Me

Remembering Talk

For a moment, neither of us moved. She was looking at me with confusion on her face. The kind of confusion you experience when you see someone you should recognize but don't. The kind of confusion that comes right before you pretend you didn't see them.

"Mara," I said.

She blinked. She looked like she was trying to place me. Like she was searching her memory for context. "Hi," she said carefully. "Do I know you?"

The words landed like a final blow. "It's Eli. We've known each other for eight years."

"Oh. Right." She said it the way you say things when you're trying to remember a fact you once knew but have since forgotten. Not like she knew me. Like she knew about me. Like she was recalling information from a lecture she'd attended in another lifetime. "I'm sorry, I can't... I can't quite place you."

"We were friends," I said. "Best friends."

"Right. That sounds... familiar." But her face suggested that nothing about this was familiar. That I was a stranger wearing the face of someone she might have known. "I'm sorry. I'm probably just tired. Work stuff has been draining."

She was already backing away. Already trying to excuse herself from this awkward situation with a stranger. Already preparing to disappear from my life in the same way I'd been disappearing from everyone else's.

"Wait," I said. "Do you remember the library? At college? Do you remember taking a photograph of me there?"

She looked uncomfortable. "I don't think—"

"You took a picture of me in the library. I have it. I was looking at a book. I didn't know you were photographing me. And you said something like 'I wanted to catch you when you weren't performing.' Do you remember that?"

Mara's face shifted. Shifted from discomfort to something like pity. Like she was watching someone have a breakdown in public. Like she was witnessing a stranger try to create false memories of a relationship that had never existed.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't remember that. And I'm really sorry but I should go. I'm meeting someone."

She walked away. She walked away from me like I was a stranger who'd been bothering her. Like I was someone she wanted to escape. And I sat on that bench and I watched her disappear into the city and I realized something that made my entire body go cold.

I wasn't being forgotten.

I was being rejected.

There was a difference. Being forgotten meant that someone had known you and then lost that knowledge. Being rejected meant that someone had never known you in the first place. Or that they'd known you and decided that you weren't worth remembering.

I thought about everything I'd documented. All the notebooks. All the evidence. All of it was proof of something, but not what I'd thought. It wasn't proof that I existed. It was proof that I'd been trying to exist. That I'd been attempting to create a self that was real enough to be remembered.

And I'd failed.

I walked home in the dark. I didn't remember most of the route. I just moved through the city like a ghost. Moving through space but not occupying it in any meaningful way. The city parted around me the way water parts around a stone. It didn't resist. It didn't acknowledge. It just existed around the space I was taking up.

When I got to my apartment, I found something that I hadn't expected.

There was a letter under my door. Just an envelope. White. Unmarked. I picked it up and opened it.

It was from my landlord. A notice to vacate. I was being evicted.

The letter said that I'd missed the last three months of rent. The letter said that they'd attempted to contact me multiple times. The letter said that they had no choice but to proceed with formal eviction proceedings.

Three months. Had it been three months? I looked at my calendar. It had been. Time had passed. The administrative leave had turned into something else. Something permanent. And I'd been sitting in my apartment, unaware that I was living there illegally. That I didn't actually have the right to be here.

I looked at the date on the letter. It had been slipped under my door two weeks ago. I'd walked past it. Stepped over it. Seen it probably without processing what it meant. Or I'd seen it and my brain had decided not to recognize it as real. Not to acknowledge it as a threat.