If You Forget | ✓

Chapter 1

My name is Elainne Winfield. I'm eighteen years old, and the only child of Jasmine and Theodore Winfield. I'm a high school senior, supposed to graduate in a couple of months. However, after graduation, I don't plan to go to college, since I'd rather stay close to home and find a job early on. Besides that, I enjoy reading and art, especially things like making pottery or paper crafts.

Or at least that's what they told me.

"Honey, are you ready?" A voice snaps me out of my thoughts. I turn to look at the woman standing in the doorway, slowly shrinking deeper into the hard mattress I'm sitting on.

Even though she's been by my side for the past two weeks, she's no more than a stranger to me. Despite sharing the same blood, I don't see a lot of similarities between us. Her chestnut hair is shorter and darker than mine, our eyes are a different color, and our faces don't have the same shape, but most of the doctors kept telling me I look a lot like my mother.

"I am," I mumble out after a minute of silence. She beckons to me and I get up from the bed.

"Let's go," she coos. "We're done with the paperwork, your dad went outside to get the car." Her voice is soft, almost like a whisper, and I feel it enveloping me as I walk over to her.

We step out into the gloomy hallway of the hospital. She gently lays her arm over my shoulders, and I mindlessly let her lead the way. My head is filled with an awkward static that drowns out all of my thoughts, and I don't pay attention to what's happening around me. I only look at my feet until my mother opens the door and I notice a shift in the air.

There's no more suffocating smell of the hospital, and instead, the warm April air greets us. Despite it being early spring, the temperature seems as if summer is right around the corner.

Not too far away from the hospital entrance, I notice a man leaning onto his car, his crossed arms resting on his chest. As soon as he sees me and mom walking out, he rushes over to our side.

"Do you need a hand?" he asks me.

"No, it's fine. I can walk on my own." I shake my head, but still let him take my other side and support me as I walk to the car. Once I'm inside, him and mom take the front seats, and before I know it, we're driving away from the hospital.

The ride is quiet. It seems that no one wants to start a conversation, but at the same time, we're all aware of the awkward atmosphere between us.

The two people in front of me are nothing more than strangers, but I've spent my entire life with them. A life I know nothing about now. Once again, I try to recall something from my past, to find anything I can latch onto, but to no avail. It's all empty.

Your memories aren't entirely gone. Your brain isn't wiped clean. Instead, think of it as putting your memories into different boxes. They were all stored away in an orderly manner, but then something important happened, so your brain locked them up and moved them out of your reach in order to deal with the event. You need to get the keys to unlock each box, but there are lots of them. You might find some of them randomly, while being in a familiar place or getting exposed to something familiar to you. For some of them, you simply need some time and mental rest. But there are keys you might never find.

I think about the words my psychiatrist told me while I was still in the hospital. According to her, I have a type of amnesia, its exact name slipping from my mind. She said that my brain might need some time to recover from what happened to me, but I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to be recovering from.

After I woke up in the hospital completely confused, I found out that I was kidnapped along with another friend of mine. I was gone for five weeks, and then I appeared out of nowhere. Someone found me near the road that leads outside of the town, so they took me to the hospital, but the boy was still nowhere to be seen. What happened in those five weeks?