Page 96 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

The candy bar dropped, and I snatched it up.

That’s what I was doing when the music died.

I was buying a fucking Snickers bar.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Gabriel

You wake up in a hospital bed and there’s a beautiful girl standing over you with tears swimming in her eyes. She’s a stranger to you. A stranger who is holding your hand. “I love you so much.”

You’ll just have to take her word for it. You have no idea who she is.Your wife, you’re told by the people who claim they’re your friends. You don’t know them either.

When they release you from the hospital, you see that you are, in fact, dead. There are photos of you covered in a sheet, being wheeled into an ambulance.

According to the headlines, you had an inoperable brain tumor.Gone too soon. You envision yourself crashing one of the candlelight vigils they’re holding in your honor. Imagine the surprise on everyone’s faces when they see your ghost.

You think it’s funny.

Your wife is livid. She buys up every tabloid and stuffs them into a garbage can.

But maybe the headlines were right. Maybe you really are dead.

You lie in bed staring at the ceiling with your head pounding and she plays nurse. Cooking your food and plumping your pillows and fussing over you like you’re a newborn. She reads to you—poetry and novels and love letters that feel too intimate to share between two strangers.

“You wrote these letters,” she tells you, trying to hide her tears when you tell her you have no interest in hearing the words another man wrote.

“Whoever this person was, it has absolutely no connection to me.”

“This person isyou,” she insists.

Every day she plays your music on the stereo. You hear it seeping through the closed door and the walls and you just want it to stop.

You have no memory of writing or recording it. You don’t know how to play the guitar even though everyone insists you can, and that you were pretty damn good at it.

You don’t remember what music you like (you have no interest in music anyway), which foods are your favorites, or any of the cities you’ve visited. You have no childhood memories, no recollection of anything that happened before you woke up in a hospital bed at the age of twenty-eight when the doctor informed you that your name is Gabriel Francis.

You look in the mirror to shave and ask yourself, Who the fuck are you?

You hold the CD case next to your face to compare and you can see that you do bear some resemblance to the photo on the cover. But you’re not so impressed with your shaved head or the thick, jagged scar that slices your skull just above your left ear.

So you stop shaving. Showers are a chore too. You just want to sit in front of the TV and watch cartoons and game shows and sitcoms where the audience laughs on cue.

“But you hate watching TV,” she tells you.

This is news to you but now you know. You hate watching TV. But you keep watching anyway.

The TV is across from the sofa and the sofa is your new bed. You think about checking into a hotel but it’s too much effort to get off the fucking sofa, so you fall asleep watching the news. None of it is good. The world is falling apart, the politicians are all corrupt, and there are rapists and murderers roaming the streets. It’s carnage out there.

Your doctors (you have a lot of doctors and your wife insists that you never miss an appointment) all tell you the same thing. You might never get your memories back but hey, good news, you can still create new ones!

Well, Halle-fucking-lujah for that. Let’s throw a ticker-tape parade and march down Memory Lane.

What is a man without his memories?

What is a relationship without memories and shared experiences to anchor it?

You are a man unmoored living in a foreign land without a map.