Dont Forget Her

Waiting for Answers

Luis didn’t sleep; he merely drifted in the shallow, restless water of a half-conscious fever dream. Outside his apartment, the vibrant pulse of the city eventually muted into a low, electric hum, but the silence only made his own thoughts louder. Every time his eyes drifted shut, the same clinical sentence echoed through the hollow hallways of his mind, bouncing off the walls like a ghost.

Your memory lapses are a little unusual for someone your age.

He rolled onto his side, the blue glare of the digital clock on his nightstand burning into the darkness: 2:17 AM. He exhaled a long, jagged breath and rubbed his face, his skin feeling like dry parchment.

“Stop obsessing,” he whispered to the shadows in the corner of the room. He tried to rationalize it. Doctors were trained to be cautious. They were professional pessimists; they liked to rule out a hundred disasters before admitting everything was fine. That was the logical explanation.

But as he stared at the faint glow of the city through the curtains, he couldn't shake the memory of Dr. Patel’s face. It wasn't the words that scared him—it was the hesitation in the doctor's eyes. It was a look Luis usually saw on structural engineers when they realized a foundation was failing.

Morning arrived with the jagged edge of a headache. When the alarm finally screamed, pulling Luis from a gray, dreamless fog, he sat up slowly. He ran his hands through his hair, feeling the grit of exhaustion in his bones. For a long minute, he simply sat on the edge of the bed, trying to reconstruct the map of his day. Then the events of yesterday returned in uneven fragments—the clinic, the memory tests, the sterile brightness of the examination room—and they landed in his chest like weight rather than recollection.

He stood and moved through his morning routine with robotic precision. At the kitchen counter, the coffee machine gurgled steadily, filling the silence with something that should have been comforting but instead felt mechanical, indifferent. He stared out at the morning commute below, at the ordered chaos of people moving with certainty. The city was a machine of steel and glass, and once upon a time, Luis had believed he understood every part of it. Now he wasn’t sure he belonged inside it at all.

He turned to grab his mug, and his eyes snagged on the refrigerator. The yellow sticky note was still there, held in place by a small, unremarkable magnet.

Doctor Appointment – Thursday.

Luis stared at it for a long time. Then he reached out and peeled it off slowly, as though disturbing it too quickly might erase something else. His thumb traced the sharp, deliberate handwriting. It was his. No question about that. The controlled precision of an architect’s script. And yet the memory of writing it did not exist anywhere inside him. No moment. No context. No continuity. Just absence where there should have been something solid.

He folded the note once, then again, until it became a small, perfect square. He slipped it into his pocket. It felt heavier than paper should have.

The architecture firm greeted him with its usual rhythm of urgency and motion. Plotters hissed, keyboards clicked in uneven symphony, and conversations overlapped in layers of partial attention. Luis had always thrived in this environment. It had always felt like controlled chaos—something he could shape, something he could master.

Today it felt distant, as though he were hearing it through water.

He sat at his desk and opened the Riverside Project. The screen filled with geometry he knew intimately—lines, elevations, load paths, decisions layered over months of thought. It was his work. His responsibility. His design.

And yet as he stared at the west elevation, something inside him hesitated.

For a fraction of a second, the structure meant nothing.

Not confusion exactly.

Disconnection.

As if the blueprint belonged to someone else and he was only reading it after the fact.

Then recognition returned, slow and slightly delayed. The atrium supports. The load distribution. The structural logic snapping back into place like a memory finally catching up with itself.

But the delay lingered.

That small gap where ownership had disappeared.

It stayed with him longer than the recognition itself.

“You look like you’ve been pulling double shifts in your sleep, Luis.”

He looked up. Daniel stood beside his desk with a coffee in hand, leaning casually as if the world was behaving normally.

“Rough night,” Luis said.

Daniel placed the cup down and pulled up a stool. “The appointment yesterday… everything okay?”

“They want more tests,” Luis replied after a pause. “Apparently my brain is being… unusual.”

Daniel exhaled through his nose, half a laugh, half dismissal. “Man, look around. Everyone here is running on fumes. You’ve been grinding nonstop since Riverside started. Anyone would start glitching.”

The word landed oddly.

Glitching.

Luis did not respond immediately.

“That’s the hope,” he said finally, though it sounded hollow even to him.

Daniel tilted his head. “You should take a break. Not a weekend. A real one. Leave. Reset. The world won’t collapse if you disappear for a few days.”

Luis looked back at the monitor. The idea felt structurally impossible. “There’s too much on the table.”

“The table will still exist when you return,” Daniel said, standing again before walking off.

Luis remained still for a long moment after he left.

Then he tried to work.

But the work resisted him in subtle ways.

He read the same email three times before it made sense. He checked calculations he already knew were correct. He opened files without remembering why. Each task required a moment of reconstruction, as though his mind needed to reassemble itself before continuing.

By mid-afternoon, the strain had become constant.

The worst moment came in the supply room.

He stood among shelves of rolled plans and labeled binders, staring at them without recognition of purpose. He had entered with intention. He was certain of that. But the intention had already dissolved.

Why am I here?

No answer came.

He stood longer than necessary, waiting for something to return.

It didn’t.

Eventually he turned and walked out, the silence in his head sharper than any noise outside it.

That evening, the apartment felt wrong in its stillness. Not quiet. Not peaceful. Just empty in a way that made the space feel larger than it should have been. Luis loosened his tie, placed it on the counter, and stood there for a moment before the phone rang.

Unknown number.

He answered.

“Luis, this is Dr. Patel.”

“Hello, Doctor.”

“I’m calling to confirm your MRI tomorrow at nine. We’ll get clarity from the scan.”

Clarity.

The word did not reassure him. It tightened something instead.

After the call ended, Luis stood in the bathroom and splashed cold water onto his face. He looked up at the mirror expecting fatigue, expecting familiarity.

For a fraction of a second, he did not recognize the man looking back.

Not in appearance.

In ownership.

The face was correct. The features aligned. But the sense of continuity—the quiet assumption that this was him—failed to arrive.

He blinked hard.

The feeling vanished.

“Just sleep,” he said quietly. “You’re just tired.”

But the reassurance did not settle the way it used to.

Later, he sat by the window as the city stretched outward in illuminated grids, each building a fixed point in a larger system that never paused. He opened his sketchbook.

The page from the park remained.

Thursday.

The old man.

The bench beneath the oak.

He turned to a new page and began to draw the skyline. His hand still knew what to do. Lines formed cleanly, almost automatically, as if muscle memory was now doing the work his mind was struggling to maintain.

When he finished, he paused.

Then wrote beneath it:

Friday night. Waiting for answers.

He closed the sketchbook slowly.

Outside, the city continued without interruption, indifferent to the man watching it from a window above its endless grid.

Luis remained seated for a long time, listening to the quiet inside his own head.

And for the first time, he did not think about deadlines or projects or structures.

He thought about continuity.

About what happens when it begins to fail.

And whether anything remains when it finally stops holding.