The Blood Shop

Forgetting

I woke up, whitewashed walls all around me.

I turned my head and the light from the window next to me truck me in the eyes, making me blink to get used to the brightness.

There were footsteps. I looked over and saw a nurse come to the chair next to my bed.

"Are you ok now?" she asked me, "you were talking in your sleep."

I shifted in the bed and said, "What...what was I saying? Where am I?"

I could not remember anything.

She smiled, "You are in the hospital. Your family visited you earlier today. We weren't expecting you would wake up so fast...especially with your injury."

I was confused. What injury? How did I get hurt?

It was scaring me...I did not remember.

I felt my head sting and I lifted my hand to feel it. She stopped me.

"Let it heal...you had quite a blow."

"What...how?"

"You might not remember," she sighed, "you got in a car crash and your head..."

Her voice trailed off.

"Where is my family?" I asked, "are they ok?"

She bit her lip and then game me a sad smile, "They are ok. It was just you in the car with a stranger in the middle of the countryside."

My eyes widened, "WHAT?"

What would I have been doing in the middle of nowhere?

My family hurried inside the room moments later. The strange thing was...I remembered my family but I didn't remember what I was doing before the car crash.

"What was I doing?" I asked them, wondering if they knew.

My mom looked uncomfortable, "The man in the car had called the police because you asked him to. You had hoped in his car all scrapped up and screaming for him to hurry and call the police."

I was dumbfounded.

"The man is hospitalized as well."

"Did the police come?"

"According to the man, yes. The police visited him once he woke up and told him that they had arrested both men that you had been running from."

Why did I feel like a detail was missing?

It was bothering me, but I didn't remember even having asked to call the police. There was no way I could go off of my memory.

................................................

Time passed and I never really knew what caused the car crash. I was told by my parents that the police had been looking for me since I had gone missing for weeks. So I had been kidnapped, but that was all I remembered.

I had been questioned about what happened to me during captivity but I could not tell them.

Apparently though, two men who had kidnapped me ended up getting arrested and another victim was saved. When I heard this shortly after waking up in the hospital, I took it as a sign that everything was going to be ok.

I didn't need to remember what happened to me.

It would probably cause pain and I would rather live on without those memories.

One day, as I was working at my laptop in the library, my mom gave me a call and told me that she had received a letter in the mail addressed to me.