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Date finds himself at a bar for the third time that week, hunched over a glass filled with amber liquid. He tells himself that it’s research, that he’s trying to find a place he feels comfortable at for the occasional post-work shot or beer, but in the back of his mind he knows he’s chasing something that he can’t quite vocalize.
Tonight, he’s chosen a small place, a dive with a handful of booths and ripped brown leather seats. The walls are plastered with photos of local sports teams and hobby groups, grins plastered across their faces and arms wrapped around each other in shows of camaraderie. A young bartender with short, choppy hair prepares a highball behind the mahogany counter, leaving Date to his thoughts as he breathes in the scent of stale, cheap beer.
A woman sits three seats down from him in a button-up blouse and tight pencil skirt, dragging a finger along the rim of her glass as she contemplates her drink. She rubs her forehead and shuts her eyes, tipping the glass back and downing the remains as her hair slips off her shoulders. With a satisfied sigh, she places her empty drink on the counter and glances at Date, offering him a smile, her eyes glowing beneath the golden lights of the bar.
Objectively, Date knows she’s attractive. Knows that there are things about her that strike him, familiar things that his eyes are drawn to. So he maps them out - those vague sensations of familiarity he can’t seem to recreate in his heart these days - and follows along, hoping he’ll find something. Anything to remind him he’s still human and not just a husk of jumbled recollections.
He approaches her more confidently than he actually feels. The words that leave his mouth feel ordinary and foreign at the same time, like he’s watching himself say them, a rehearsal from his previous life. And then he feels it - that distance he’s felt so many times since losing his memory, that invisible wall that springs up and severs the roots he’s planted before they can secure themselves in the ground.
There’s a battle that happens in his mind whenever he feels like this, one where he tells himself over and over that there’s no before and after, there’s only Date, but he’s not sure he believes it. He doesn’t quite recall how flirting with strangers felt before, but he’s almost certain that it wasn’t like this. Something’s different.
That’s when he backpedals, trying to come up with another excuse, one that doesn’t feel so permanent and imbued into him. Maybe she’s just not actually his type, he tells himself.
Just like all the others.
Maybe some switch went off in his brain, one of those sprinkles of intuition you just
have
as he started talking to her.
Just like all the others.
But there’s enough of his old self thumping about, that maelstrom of sensations and lingual flexibility and feelings that twist around in his head but don’t quite reach his heart.
In the end, he bites his lip. Excuses himself as her eyes light up with interest. Heads back to his seat, downs the rest of his whiskey, lets the burn linger in his throat as he leaves a few bills on the counter and stumbles out into the night, the jovial hum of the bar’s patrons vanishing behind him.
The streets are barren, the locals having mostly retired to prepare for work the following morning, and the only accompaniments he has are the flickering streetlights and muffled noises of life in the homes he passes. Pots and pans clambering, families gathered around tables, lovers squeezing in a little extra time together before the sun inevitably rises. Scraps of memory tug at him again, in flickers of stability, warmth, happiness, peace, love ; in fleeting images and sensations of warmth against his skin. In charred dinners, childish giggles, the steady, reserved voice of a woman that he can’t discern the words of. He loses track of time in the stillness of the dark, the world lulls to sleep around him as the tattered scraps of memories wave violently in the winter gusts, clutching at his ankles, dragging his feet along the sidewalk.
Date has a lot of nights like this. Nights where he moves slowly, feeling listless, hollow, broken, like a core part of him has been stripped out. He supposes that’s how losing your entire identity probably should feel. Connecting to others is hard when you barely have a sense of who you are, she said in a hushed voice, deep in the bowels of the police station. But there’s a part of him that, despite all she’s done to help him, doesn’t believe Boss is being entirely truthful. A sense that what’s happening to him goes so much deeper than she wants to let on.
He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s terrified. Terrified that he’s lost something far, far worse than who he was. Terrified that he remembers what it was like to be connected to others, but now, no matter what he does, no matter who he talks to, he can’t seem to feel anything at all. Terrified that whenever he thinks of Boss - of how, logically, he’s thankful that she’s helped him out so much - he feels nothing, even though he remembers how he should feel, just like how he remembers how he should have felt when he was flirting with that woman at the bar.
He reaches his apartment before long. When he arrives at the door, he stops for a moment, processing his thoughts. Lets the anger at his current condition wash over him as he tightens his grip around the doorknob and flings the entrance open before collapsing on his bed.
That night, he dreams that he’s in the middle of a construction yard, high atop a platform connected to another by a steel beam. Flames shoot out from below him, devouring the scaffolding at the smoke billows up. Boss stands on the other, a crowd of people behind her as she waves him across, telling him that the bridge between them is going to fall. He tries to follow, but the smoke blows into his eyes and burns, halting him as the beam crashes to the ground and shakes the earth. They shout at him that there’s still a way across, that he can still figure it out. Frantically, he looks around for something else to bridge the gap, for materials or a ladder or something to get him away from the fire.
But there’s nothing, he realizes, as the smoke sucks the air from him.