The Last Conversation (Forward Collection, #5)

by Paul Tremblay

With the slight movements there is pain. Your muscles and joints hum with it.

Just beautiful writing.

You’ve been awake and not-awake for days, maybe weeks, perhaps longer. You do not know where you were then, or before then. You are here now.

Cataloging the thought process of someone re-learning who they are

A phantom is something you imagine, something that isn’t there. 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.

To your shame (yes, shame, as how could it not be your fault somehow?) you have forgotten the full sensory experience of being near an ocean. 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 memory is not retrievable because it is not there, was never there.

“This is our house? We lived here?” “Yes. Well, it’s not our original house. It’s a replica. Not perfect, but, you know”—she pauses and rubs your arm—“nothing is.”

You both raise a hand up to your face. You are not who you remember. You are not the person in the pictures and videos Anne has showed you. You are someone else entirely, and you want to yell but it comes out as a low, keening moan.