Hesitating and Suffocating

Cally looked through pictures of a person she didn’t recognize, someone she didn’t know. It was her, and she hardly knew the blonde girl, a stud in her upper cartilage and a smile on her lips as she hugged a tall and lanky boy who looked at her like she put the stars in the sky. She sighed, looking at Garrett with her lip in her teeth. “This is John, isn’t it?” She murmured, fingering her upper ear, trying to find the hole where the stud had once been, but it appeared to have grown over.

Pat had gone to find Jared and have him come say hello, Cally saying she was ready, though she wasn’t. Not at all. Not looking at these pictures of a life she didn’t remember living with someone who apparently was her everything but couldn’t remember a single goddamn thing about their time together.

Garrett looked up at her, chewing his own lip too, a habit she had begun. “Yeah, that’s you and John,” He said, pointing to the first picture on the page, where he had his arm around her and her arm was around a boy she remembered vaguely, but whose name she had forgotten. “This is when we first met you, and Halvo, the guy who your arm is around, wanted a picture for his tour journal or something.” She nodded slowly, the name Halvo ringing a bit of a bell, faint.

“I knew it was John,” She murmured, touching his face with her fingertips, like little fairies over the picture. “It’s the way he’s looking at her- I mean me. He looks at her like he wants nothing else than to just be with her.” Tears began to fall down her face, and she wiped them away impatiently. “I want someone to look at me like that, and I want to remember,” She said quietly. She looked up at Garrett, putting her hands back in her lap. “I really loved him too, didn’t I?”

Garrett shifted uncomfortably before answering. “Yeah, Cally, I think you did.” He sighed. “I mean, the day of the accident, you were coming to dinner with him, and he was going to propose.” She went poker face, chewing on the inside of her lip as she flipped quickly through pages, finding one from New Year’s, where she was kissing him with such love she almost cried. Not because she missed him, because she had nothing to miss, but because she had never loved like that.

It was like looking at pictures of someone else, like someone’s sister or someone you used to know. It was absolutely bizarre for Cally to look at these pictures of herself and not know anything going on in any of them. It was like looking into the future, too, because it was she that was in them all, but didn’t know.

She closed the book. “Well, I’m glad that John had moved on and is happy with this girl you told me about,” She said briskly, opening the one that was from when Cally and Pat were pretending to be together. Garrett watched her face carefully, and saw it before she did.

“Aha,” He said, smirking. “I saw that.” In a typical Cally move, she cursed under her breath, meeting Garrett’s eyes. “You want to know what it’s like, being with him, don’t you?” She looked at him with fire eyes.

“No. I think that being with him, like my normal routine, will bring back my memories. But you know what, you’re right, okay? You’re right. He needs to move on from me because he wanted to marry me and I don’t remember him, and you know ... I don’t think I want to see him again. I think that knowing him would hurt, because I’d know I was hurting him by existing.” She sighed, and the next part was muttered so quietly Garrett thought he might be imagining it. “Maybe everyone is hurting by me existing.”

“No, Cally, that isn’t-” He began, but Cally sighed deeply, looking back at him with those eyes made of fire, and she began to yell the way the new Cally yelled- talking at a normal volume.

“You’re telling me that when you met me, you thought that someday, you would be completely and totally okay with having me, with no memory of you or anything, to take care of? You think that’s what Gemma needs right now? What any of you need? You’re fucking famous, for God’s sakes!” She put her head in her hands, angry tears falling down her cheeks and into her lap. “You were all better off when I was just some girl John met. That was when I had no baggage, nothing! Now I’m here, with no memory of the last six months or anything of the fucking sort, and I’m bringing your life to its knees!” She was almost yelling now, the loudest she had ever gotten.

Garrett stared at her, unsure of what to say as she buried her fingers in her hair, tearing at it as she kept her face hidden, tears hitting his coffee table like little bombs. Finally, he scooted over towards her, wrapping his arms around her and letting her bury her face in his chest. He knew it must be scary, and he was trying so hard.

“Cally?” He whispered, and she stopped crying, now just hiccuping as he gently whispered. “Cally, I want you to know that this isn’t what I thought six months later would be, and I hate that. But you’re here now, and you’re going to get your memory back, and everything is going to be fine and dandy like it was before, okay?”

She was tired of lying. “What if I never get my memory back, Gare?” She murmured, now tracing invisible patterns in his chest, trying so hard to calm down but she couldn’t. This was so fucking hard, and she was giving herself headaches and heartbreaks trying to remember all these people and times and things people had said to her when all she really needed was to go back to bed and sleep for days. She wanted drugs and she wanted sleep and she wanted to remember and she didn’t and she was trying to figure out how that was humanly possible.

“Then we’ll make new ones.” Garrett hugged her tight, but couldn’t help but feel a nagging suspicion that the girl he held in his arms wasn’t the same one who left him earlier in the year. And he thought he knew exactly why.