The Last Conversation (Forward Collection, #5)

by Paul Tremblay

Pain is such a subjective experience, but that pain made me think I was alone, or maybe that I wasn’t even me.”

What does the knowing imply about your person, your interests prior to your being here?

You wonder if time is a phantom because it feels like you walked for longer than thirty minutes. You wonder if she is lying to you.

This is your fear: you are not asking the correct questions

These memories are proof of you,

“You lose yourself in the undeniable pleasure of remembering.”

You feel powerful and weak at the same time.

you can’t help but feel disappointed by the reappearance of yourself, and at the same time, you fall a little bit more in love with who you were,

You are aware that everyone experiences some form of auditory dissociation upon hearing their own voice, the feeling of Do I really sound like that? You understand the tone and pitch of the voice you hear when you speak are determined by the mix of air conduction and sounds traveling directly to your cochlea via the tissues in your own head. But should your recorded voice sound so different as to be unrecognizable? Shouldn’t there be an underlying cadence or rhythm, one that identifies you as the speaker?

her presence fills the room.

To forget is to lose something that was once yours, that was once of yourself. But how could one lose something as expansive as an ocean in a dusty corner of one’s mind? What if, instead, to forget is to open a door to a void; the

Maybe your memories are creating themselves;

“Your hands do not remember to whom they once belonged.”

You consider the origin of this time during which you’ve been awake and not-awake and conclude it is, for the moment, unknowable.