I had the urge to get up and start tearing through the place, but my body refused to comply. I could only sit there, listless, watching Kai’s fingers trace over the creased spines of my books.
“You read a lot of romance,” he observed quietly. “I don’t know why this surprises me so much.”
“Yeah, I like reading about love,” I murmured with my eyes half-closed.
He turned to me, intrigued. “Why love?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I have such a hard time experiencing it myself,” I admitted, too exhausted for defenses for once.
“Don’t you think you can experience it in real life?” he asked.
“What is real life?” I countered, the skin of my arms tingling under the layers of my clothes. “Where does the line between reality and fantasy start, and where does it end?”
Kai paused to consider this, and not just to indulge me. I could tell from his expression that he wanted for his curiosity to reflect mine. He wanted to question the structure of the world around him almost as much as he wanted to believe in it. “Maybe there is no line at all,” he decided. “Everything humanity has was once imagined. An idea. A feeling. A thing trapped inside a person. So maybe reality is just the byproduct of fantasy and vice versa.”
I could never put it into words. The reliable quality of his voice and its inexplicable power over me. The way I just gave in and smiled, his certainty washing over me like a bright healing light.
“Do you think I can imagine a past for myself, too?” I asked.
Kai smiled back, radiant and affecting as the moon. “I think you can do anything, Anya,” he said. “Anything you want.”
And I tried it for a moment, forcing my mind to stretch past the black spot where my memories began to fade. I tried filling this empty space with warm, colorful imaginings, scripting and directing scenes like the ones Kai had described. Birthday parties, balloons and presents, and the glow of candles haloing a room full of people who knew and loved me and whom I knew and loved back. Summer holidays somewhere sunny and remote, fine sand, popsicles, and a chemical sunscreen scent. Pink locket diary written in glitter gel pen. Sticker books and friendship bracelets. Starlit kisses and late-night car rides to nowhere. A boy threading his fingers between mine. Or maybe a girl. Or maybe no one. Just the smooth, glossy surface of myself.
Where and how do I even begin to form an identity without all the daily miseries, happinesses, quirks, failures, and dreams that formed a person? I was human, but I was not aperson. That was what it felt like living inside my body, if I could even call it a body and not just a vessel with a year-old consciousness.
That was why I hadn’t been provided with nostalgia, I realized. I had nothing to feel nostalgic about. I was a blank canvas. And perhaps there was hope in that too. Perhaps I really could create myself anew, accumulate enough memories and experiences to become a real girl. But that, I knew, would take time, and this for some reason terrified me, because it already felt like I had lost so much of it.
“Anya?”
Slowly, I blinked, and the room in all its faded beauty returned into focus. Kai was standing by the kitchenette, looking at me the way he always did, with quiet attentiveness and a question in his eyes that I never seemed quite able to answer.
How many nights had I spent lying on my bed trying not to think about him being here with me like this? There were a thousand things I couldn’t recall, and yet I could recount every night I had spent languishing in thoughts of him in perfect detail.
Memory was a selective and therefore revealing thing. You could find out exactly who you were just by looking at the things you had chosen to remember. But what about the things you had chosen to forget? What did those things reveal about you?
“So,” Kai ventured tentatively. “I’m off work next week.”
Surprised, I sat up on the sofa. “Are you going on vacation?”
“I usually visit the countryside this time of year. I hate the heat, so I’m always the last one to take time off work.”
“I’ve never been outside the city,” I whispered, adding one more item to the long list of things I’d never done, or at least, could not remember myself doing.
Kai cleared his throat, and when I dragged my gaze back to him, I was surprised to find him blushing, rubbing a hand over his nape in the same self-conscious way he’d done outside of Sullivan’s last night. “You can come with me if you want. If you feel like you need to get away for a bit. I have this tiny cottage by the coast. It’s nothing fancy, but the view is spectacular. I swear, sometimes it feels like the sky is closer there.” He laughed with himself, looking at me in a way that felt deeply vulnerable. As though this question was more than just an invitation to his holiday home. Perhaps an invitation to his life.
The feeling in my chest was novel, a configuration of surprise and excitement, elation and disappointment. I was touched, but at the same time I knew I couldn’t go. I couldn’t even imagine straying from my routine now that I was hoping to find a new meaning in it.
“Thank you. Honestly, that’s so generous. But I… I’m sorry, I just can’t go,” I stammered through the rushing in my throat. “I have my assessment on Monday. And I think you’re right. I think I should go to the Center and get some answers.”
“I can wait for you if you want,” he offered.
Awkwardly, I murmured, “I don’t know, Kai.”
He nodded, unsurprised by my decision. “If you change your mind, you can always call me. And even if you don’t, call me anyway.”
Before he left, he made breakfast for us—scrambled eggs on rye bread with roasted tomatoes on the side and a pot of sweet milk tea—while I napped on the sofa. He woke me up with a hand on my forehead, his warm fingers smoothing back my hair, and after we ate, talking a bit about work, we stepped out onto the balcony to smoke, our wrists pressed against the railing right next to each other.
“When you’re there,” I said after several minutes of comforting silence, “will you send me a postcard? You know, one of those touristy ones? I’ve never had something like that.”
