It's a Start

Finally!

After trying so hard to actually make something move, my finger twitched and I tried again somewhere else. I still didn’t know where the hell I was or why it was so dark. I needed light.

My body started coming alive and I could feel that pressure on my upper arm, like something was on me. The next twitch was above my eyes and I started shaking. Then my fingers straightened and my ears flooded with sounds after being struck by lightning.

“Oh my God! Dr. Carr!” The man’s shriek was too loud for my fragile ears. Make it stop.

Something squeezed my left hand and I didn’t like it. I took mine away, wanting it to be free and cooler. It was too warm wherever I was. My body shuddered again as I tried opening my eyes, squeezing them shut. They weren’t having it, telling me no. Just let me open them! Finally, they fluttered open and the light came in.

They adjusted to the new brightness and my neck craned to the right to take in my surroundings while my arms lifted me to sit up more. I was in a bed in a room with ugly yellow walls and blue trim. A brown wooden door was positioned in the right wall, closed for privacy as well as the white blinds of the two windows. There were two chairs, one on my right and one on my left. A light brown wooden table was stood against the wall across from the bed with get-well cards and pictures.

The two men in the room were both staring at me: one in amazement and one with a small smile on his face. The one with the smile wore a long white coat with blue pants that looked fake and black shoes. A puff of white was on his head with some shiny parts exposed. From the stethoscope around his neck, I guessed that he was the doctor. So, if he was the doctor then who was the other man? He had brown hair on his head unlike the doctor and he wore blue jeans with a plain t-shirt. I couldn’t see his feet, so I couldn’t say what shoes he was wearing. My guess was sneakers, maybe blue or green.

“Hello there,” the doctor said softly, bringing the chair over to sit down. The other man sat too and kept his eyes on me. “My name’s Dr. Carr and the date is April 18th, 2014. You’re in a hospital in Tempe, Arizona: your hometown and you’ve just woken up from a coma that you suffered from a car accident that took place two months ago. Do you understand?”

What? A car accident that happened two months ago and I’ve just now woken up? What the hell? I nodded and swallowed. “If you’re the doctor then who’s he?” I motioned to the other man sitting to my left. He was sat up straight, but sunk back into the chair when I spoke. His eyes deflated and I wondered why.

The doctor leaned closer and pointed at the man. “This is Craig Michaels and you’re Andrea Collins,” he paused, letting it sink in while I just stared at the man– Craig. “Andrea, do you know your middle name?”

My head turned and I tried to think about his question, searching for the answer. “No,” I frowned and dropped my head shamefully.

After a few seconds, Dr. Carr stood. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched him leave, closing the door silently behind him. The room was quiet and I looked around again, seeing a phone on the table beside me and looking back at Craig. “What is my middle name?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me sadly, “Blake. You’re named after your great grandmother.”

I tried to picture her, but couldn’t come up with anything. When I looked back at him, his eyes were still on me. “How– What’s my relation to you?”

Craig sighed, looking down at his lap and when he looked back at me I knew that he didn’t want to explain. His eyes were full of pain. “I’m your fiancé.”

Shivers went down my back, all the way to my toes and right when the word left his mouth my hands covered mine and my eyes welled up with tears. I didn’t know my own fiancé. How messed up is reality?

When Dr. Carr came back with papers, he walked in on me bawling like a baby. How could I forget my own fiancé? Why did this happen to me? I wiped my cheeks and that was when I noticed the ring on my finger, shiny and silver. Dr. Carr sat down again and briefly explained what was happening. I was suffering from traumatic amnesia from the car accident and apparently the strike disabled a section of my brain, which included my identity, the people I knew, and my past. I could still walk and talk because that ability was in a different section of my brain that hadn’t been tampered with.

The doctor said I couldn’t go home for a few days because I was now scheduled for MRI and CT scans. I had a busy few days ahead of me.

After all the news and talk with the doctor, he left me alone for the night and Craig went and got me food. I had been getting fed through a tube and the thought of that made me a little queasy.

“Yeah, you never liked needles. Only if they were permanently putting ink in your body,” Craig told me while we were eating and that caused me to pull down my gown and see through a mirror that there was a tattoo on my collarbone. Backwards, it looked like it said, “One love.” The font was thin and in cursive.

“Why ‘one love’?” I asked him, wiping my mouth with a napkin.

He smiled to himself, thinking of the old Andrea that wasn’t here anymore. “You were a very passionate person. You had this whole idea in your head that everyone has exactly one love– either that or no one.”

I watched his eyes glisten since he was probably thinking of the news he just took in and was dealing with. It must’ve been hard for him. “How did we meet?”

“I’ve known you since my junior year of high school and you were the very first girl to catch my attention. You were in your sophomore year. I went up to you one day and introduced myself and for the rest of the hour we had left, we walked around the school and just got to know each other. You made me laugh a lot,” he looked at me lovingly and that only made me want to cry again. That Andrea was still in his heart, but that wasn’t me. “About three weeks later, we hung out at the football game and that night I asked you if we could go on a date and you said yes with the biggest smile ever. My mom took us to the movies and I was really nervous to the point where I went to the bathroom three times during the movie.” He laughed a little, making me smile and lean my head back to hear the rest of the story. “We talked almost every day for the rest of the year and you went away to Michigan for the summer with your parents and once you got back, we hung out every day for the next two months. We didn’t even kiss until a year later because you were really serious about school and you didn’t want boys distracting you.

“After your senior year, your parents kicked you out and we weren’t even dating yet and I was the first person that you went to. I moved out at a young age to live with my friends and you stayed there with me while going to college.”

“Where are my parents?”

“In Michigan, where they should be.”

That was a low blow to the heart. “Why do you say it like that?”

“Because your parents are low-lives, Andrea. They treated you with so much hate since the day you were born– you even said so yourself. They never cared about you like I do. They kicked you out because you were too good for them and because they didn’t want to be embarrassed by you.”

He noticed that I was hurt by his words, so he set down his trash on the floor and leaned his elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound like an asshole when I say all that stuff, but it’s the truth. Ever since the day they kicked you out, they haven’t tried to contact you. Not even when I called them the day after your accident.”

I wanted to know more about them. Why did they do what they did and why hadn’t they talked to Andrea? It’s not like it would’ve mattered because maybe this was meant to happen; maybe I was supposed to forget about what they did to Andrea or me. I wanted to remember their faces, I wanted to remember what it felt like to be kicked out by my own parents, and I wanted to remember what it felt like to be asked out on a date. I wanted to remember, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Andrea knew all that information and I wasn’t her. I had to deal with it.

Craig gathered all the trash that was in the room and after about ten minutes of standing and walking around, he picked up his jacket and put it over his arms. “I should go and let you get some rest. Today must’ve been hard for you.” He stopped himself from hugging or kissing me. That only broke my heart all over again from the time that he told me who he was. “Um, I’ll be back around noon tomorrow with some of your clothes from home.”

“Craig,” I said before he could leave me alone. My shoulders loosened and I breathed out. “I’m so sorry.”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “I know you are. Andrea would be too.” He left then and I stared at the door, wishing and praying that my memory would come back right that second and I could get up and run out, yelling after him that I remembered and he would be happy. Even though I didn’t know him, I wanted him to be happy.

A nurse came in to provide meds to help me sleep easy and I thanked her as she walked out, diming the lights around me. Looking down at the ring on my finger, I twirled it a few times while my eyes drooped and my head lay against the pillow.

Before going to sleep, I looked back at the phone on the stand beside me and grabbed it. A picture of Andrea and Craig showed up and they looked so happy together. Her nose was pressed up against his cheek while they were both smiling big and bright. I wanted to see that smile on Craig.

I couldn’t do much with the phone since I followed the directions of sliding the screen to unlock it, but I couldn’t because there was a code I had to enter in order to get in. For obvious reasons, I set it back down on the table and turned on my side. The ring twirled around my finger again and again before my eyes were starting to droop again.

Andrea Blake Collins had to come back. She needed to come back to repair Craig’s broken heart. I couldn’t do that for him because I wasn’t his love. Come back.