Pictures Of You

Snapshot #1 | Erin: Decoding Secret Notes

Click.

Fifth grade Sunday School classroom.  Erin was sitting next to me.  Mason and Jack across the table giving us looks as they whispered to one another.  Erin leans over to me, not breaking her intense stare aimed at the boys.

❝Ash, we have to get that piece of paper Jack is writing on.❞

I nodded in agreement.  A week or so before, we had received a piece of paper that was all in number code.  We had exchanged it back and forth in an attempt to decode it.  Of course, being the majorly naive and boy-crazy eleven-year-old kids that we were, we  knew it would be a "confession of love" from Jack to Erin; whether the encoded confessional of ardent love was real or not was another mystery to solve at a later date.

We had ended up decoding enough of it to confirm the confessional of love from the secret writer to Erin.  There were only two people it could be: Jack or Mason.  Even though everyone knew there were constantly sparks between Jack and Erin (and also Mason and I), we needed confirmation that it really was Jack writing.  Whether it was just an adventure we wanted to have or whether Erin actually wanted to know if Jack truly liked her is something I did not know.

I knew class was ending because Bailey, the teachers' helper, was passing out our Twinkies.  My focus was not on Twinkies though, no, my attention was on the piece of paper Jack had been writing on during class.  Jack was never one for unnecessary things, so if there was not anything of interest on the paper, he would simply discard it.  I also figured he was using it as bait for us.  It was like the boys were purposely leaving clues for us to find.  I did not mind though.  It was fun.  I wanted adventure and Erin wanted answers.

I hated Twinkies.  But I had to eat mine this time so I could have an excuse to throw away the wrapper and retrieve the paper.  The boys left before us and the Erin gave me a look as she saw Jack quite purposely throwing the paper away in front of us.  She got up from her chair, giving me one last look of reassurance, and then walked over to the boys to talk to them while I did my work.  My heart was pounding, but I was distracted by the overly sweet taste of the Twinkie in my mouth.  Yuck.

As I bent down, rather awkwardly, to throw away my wrapper, I slipped the crumpled piece of paper into my fingers.  Then up my body the paper went until it found its way into the small pocket on the front of my Bible case.  Erin was standing at the doorway with Jack and Mason.  As I slipped past them, I whispered to Erin.

❝I got it.❞

Click.

Everyone just stood there in my hospital room as I came back from the trance-like state I had just been in while seeing the snapshot.  Erin was there and I looked directly from the book, to the picture, to her.

❝Y-you...  You were the one with the blue-inked paper that I decoded for you, in fifth grade, in Sunday School.❞

She nodded with a bit of cautious optimism. ❝You're right...❞

She looked different than what I remembered.  Of course, it had been nearly seven years since that had happened.  She was just older now.  My brain had made a connection though.  That picture of her that I had taken for her senior pictures had jogged my memory.  But as I looked at her and then at the picture, I tried to remember anything else.  But only that snapshot came to mind.  Otherwise she was just a stranger.

I had more scans on my brain and then they doctors brought psychologists in.  The scans showed that the relational pathways in my brain were damaged, which everyone kind of already knew, but they said they could be rebuilt.  The psychologists tried hypnosis and different treatments to try and see if more memories could be made with Erin.  Their efforts were futile though.  As hard as they tried, I only had that one snapshot as a memory of Erin.  The best chance I had was to continue stimulating my brain in order to rebuild the pathways.  As optimistic as we wanted to be, the doctors warned that as fast as the pathways could come back, they could be destroyed beyond repair.

❝We have to start somewhere,❞ Erin said.  ❝This is her only chance to have any memory of her loved ones at all.❞

I looked at them  a bit dumbfounded.  I thought I was fine.  If anything was weird to me, it was the fact that I was seeing lucid snapshots of people I thought I did not know.   I was up for seeing more pictures though.  I did not necessarily know what was going on, but I had no purpose in life and my legs were still broken, so it sounded kind of fun to me.

No one really knew what lay ahead for me, not even me, but things were definitely about to happen.  Things were about to change.