#5 Memoryless

Kolkata - 17th August 2021

I woke up.

I don't know where I am: I look around. Everything feels... familiar, but unknown.

A woman walks in, and tells me that she loves me, and she is my mother, and I have a rare disease that wipes my memory every time I go to sleep, and so everyday morning, when I wake up she repeats the same lines everyday, to give me an orientation for that day. What I do, where I go, who are the close people, and what I am skilled at.

I look at her, dumbfounded.

We sat there in silence.

I asked, "How long has it been like this?"

"For a long time, you started to have mild issues at the beginning, we went to the doctor, he said that it wasn't treatable. So I started to make a system within which you can live a normal life"

"Normal?"

"Relatively normal, yes"

"Do other people know this?"

"Well, some do, some don't. You can function quite coherently when you are with other people, you even instinctively know that you've known them for a long time and that helps you orient yourself, but you don't remember the specifics, but other people do. That's why sometimes you can be quite hard to deal with, because it seems like you never learn from your lessons. But that's not true. You do learn new things, but it's much harder for you and it takes more repetitions, so that eventually your brain gets the habit of it, even if you consciously don't know it. That's how you can speak, write, swim, read a clock or ride a cycle. You don't do it consciously."

"I don't remember anything about my past, it feels like I am just born, but I am not overwhelmed."

"That's right. It is your instincts that know that the world you are in is not new, you have been here before, and even if you don't know it, your instincts do. You treat people poorly today and then you forget it, and tomorrow they will give you the cold shoulder, and you'll wonder why, but deep down you know it is justified. Because, you don't remember, but the world remembers and deep down, you do too."

"Why should I go to sleep then, if I keep forgetting everything? I should just stay awake"

"Hahaha...", the woman laughed. "You have tried it many times. Once you even managed to go without sleeping for a whole week. But eventually you got tired and fell asleep. Nobody can stay awake forever, we will all eventually go to sleep sometime or the other."

"So like death?"

"Yes, like death"