![]() ![]() In the process of telling Sam stories about our past, I had created a new story, and it ended with us getting back together. “I feel like I have to go through the emotions of breaking up all over again,” he said.Ĭycling home, I realized I did too. That was the point in our story where his experience branched away from mine. He had asked a friend why I didn’t visit more often, and this friend had said we were no longer together. They are the connective tissue not only between our past and present selves but between us and the people we love.Ībout a month into his recovery, Sam said he wanted to talk. His brain was busy threading its neural networks back together, triggering those patterns of synaptic activity that make up a memory, and in doing so slowly restoring his sense of self. In his proper mind, he would find what was happening to him fascinating. I wanted an account of our story to exist independent to mine, but there was little I could do to prevent my account of our past polluting his own.Īs an undergraduate, Sam studied neuroscience. ![]() Part of the pleasure - and conflict - in collective reminiscence is the inevitable discrepancies. I didn’t want my telling of our story to influence his own burgeoning memories. And I enjoyed our hours together, sharing with pleasure memories that after our breakup had been so painful. His short-term memory remained patchy, which I used as an excuse. On subsequent visits, I kept intending to tell him the truth and then didn’t. I soon realized that as much as he didn’t remember our time together, he also didn’t remember that we had broken up. Sam cried with delight, as if a switch in his brain had flicked on and let the light flood in. I showed him pictures of our mutual friends. Sam with the 18th-century cavalry sword I gave him for his 21st birthday. Sam in the catacombs of Paris on our first trip together. So did his closest friends.Īs Sam struggled through his recovery, I turned up with slide shows. His doctor said we had a window of opportunity to restore his memories and the more we could help him recall now the less permanent damage might be. If Sam could not remember, I would be alone in that landscape. To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective past. And if he couldn’t remember the joy, it may as well have never happened. He couldn’t remember our strolls down Brick Lane in our Sunday best or dancing in a field with our friends. He couldn’t have recalled, for example, that first tree-climbing date, or how the next morning he went to buy us breakfast and returned with three boxes of cake from a French patisserie, and we ate strawberry cream puffs naked in bed with our bare hands. He knew who I was but couldn’t remember what I did or how we met. His childhood was intact, but the last few years - the span of our entire relationship - had vanished. He didn’t know he was about to start a graduate program at the Central Saint Martins or that he lived in a dilapidated warehouse in Whitechapel with a pet rabbit. I soon realized it wasn’t just his short-term memory. He greeted each nurse as if they were visiting for tea. He was still eloquent and charming in his incoherence, as if trying to talk his way out of the abyss of amnesia. His mind would restart every few minutes, causing a stream of kaleidoscopic ramblings. The head trauma had caused short-term memory loss, significant enough that several times Sam tried to get out of bed in confusion and fell. “You were in an accident,” I said, “but you’re safe now.” Then he whispered, “I don’t know why I’m here?” I tried to see beyond the bandages and tubes, the metalwork bonding his bones. When I arrived, Sam was sitting up in bed. ![]()
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