Chapter Text
The sound of rain brought with it a sense of dread so disproportionate to what should have been a pleasant, calming atmosphere, that its occurrence alone should have hinted at something being amiss. Yet even as Jonathan found himself barely able to catch his breath, expecting the sensation of drowning or something far worse than that, nothing seemed out of place - not at first, not in this moment. He was afraid of that sound, that cascading curtain of grey covering the view from his window. The apartment wasn't flooded, but he felt like he'd lived a flood once, somewhere... sometime - he'd been stuck in it, waiting to be submerged, with nowhere to run. His covers pooled over his lap as he stroked his arms all the way up to his shoulders like a man trying to warm himself up, rubbing only to feel alive, to feel anything at all that would convince him that that dreadful cold, wet embrace of rising waters was in his dream and not here in the reality.
That was when that sensation hit for the first time, like a sudden strike of vertigo. It unbalanced the horizon but only ever so slightly, making it jump like an earthquake, but only within Jon's own perception, yet still his hands charged to grip the sheets and he closed his eyes firmly, cursing under his breath. He didn't need this, not on top of the rain that was like nails on a chalkboard to his ears, anything - anything - but calming. He tried to reassure himself, tell himself that there were people who would voluntarily fall asleep to the soundtrack of rain every night, that they played it from their phones in the dark to lull themselves to a restful sleep, but it didn't make a difference. Something about the rain was like teeth against his skin and he hated every moment of it pounding the walls and windows of his hideout. And underneath it, that sense of... of something being amiss here, something being fundamentally different to how it had been before, but before what, he just couldn't wrap his mind around. There was an emptiness there where memory should have been, and the more he tried to grasp a hold of it, the further away it faded like a half-waking dream he'd had and which was now leaving him to make room for reality, only this seemed to be the other way around, like he was losing reality in exchange for a dream.
He reached out his hand, unwrapping his fingers from his sheets. The bed was empty, too empty and wide for his liking, and there was something in that fact that further assured him that something was not as it should have been, though it brought him no closer to remembering what in or how the world had changed. The empty bed haunted him, however. He didn't want to leave it, not only for the manner in which the rain was chaining him in place like roots growing around his limbs, but because he was certain that if he'd move - even as little as stretching out his legs - he'd end up losing that faint memory that he was chasing for good... and with it, he'd lose something important to him, something he wouldn't be able to ever replace. Still he could already feel that no matter how long he'd stay there, unmoving, barely breathing out of the suffocating feeling crushing his chest at the sound of the downpouring rain outside, he would eventually lose that memory... that no matter what he'd do, he wasn't supposed to remember, and it would be torn from him despite his attempts to hold onto it tooth and nail.
Slowly, he allowed himself to take in more than just the surface he'd woken up on. His senses opened up to reach away from the mattress, to the wooden frame of the bed that smelled faintly of varnish like it had been crafted yesterday, and from there to the white walls that surrounded him - a marble tomb, his mind unhelpfully offered. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. When he looked again, he was no longer entombed; instead, he sat in an open bedroom, illuminated by a large window letting in daylight through the heavy clouds casting water down at the earth. The room was airy, with its door slightly ajar, and it was clean, although Jon felt it was perhaps a little too clean, even for him, and especially for him and... the memory ached in his brain. He was so close to it that it was almost taunting him, staying just out of reach, and the more he struggled to grasp at it now the more he felt like perhaps he didn't want to find it after all - that maybe it was within reach, but he was holding himself back from it, even as he hoped against hope to remember. Something seemed to tell him: no, you don't want to know.
Let it go.
He shifted his leg, then the other, and dropped his feet on the floor. He lived nicely, but not too nicely. He'd made it a little haven for himself with all the comforts of a home in the heart of London, with the city buzzling outside, lively already at seven in the morning. He had bills on his table and a ring a cup of tea had left upon it next to them. He had a fridge full of food and some library books piled in front of the TV that looked like it was overdue for a dusting. He had a laptop, an old one with a busted corner, he did remember that, remembered how he'd lost his grip on it and it had fallen from a short distance only to land on that corner, and how he'd examined the screen first for cracks and found none, and then that corner where the plastic had shattered from the impact. Or did he remember it? It felt like a story he was telling himself to explain that crack now, a convincing little lie that slipped him so easily it might as well have been the truth but it wasn't, and yet he couldn't tell a better one so he had no choice but to accept it. When he moved into the kitchen, another thing struck him like a shock, but slowly, as it took him a good long while to realise what was amiss. There he was, standing in the middle of his lower middle class kitchen, looking around for his breakfast, for a newspaper laid out on the table and a cup of steaming tea set together with some toast and eggs, maybe, or maybe cereal if it had been a busy morning... a busy morning for whom?
Who would have laid out his breakfast, if not himself? What was he waiting for? He closed his eyes again. The room swayed gently underneath his feet.
No, he lived alone. He was certain of it. He'd always lived alone. Or had he? For a man well in his thirties, shouldn't he have had at least one significant relationship living together with somebody else? He couldn't remember one. In fact, he wasn't sure if he'd ever had a relationship to begin with. There was something there in the middle of everything that felt like a large black hole, a void where his life should have been, and before then it felt as much like a dream as the present moment, where nothing really seemed to be as he needed it, as he expected it to be.
But of course he'd had relationships. The realisation dawned to him like a printer spitting out a paper, line by line with the same kind of a crackling, hissing, mechanical sound carving it into his brain. He had to be sick. Had he been sick recently? Why wasn't he at work, anyway? His eyes wandered for a moment before he found the analog clock on the wall. Five past seven in the morning. Shouldn't he be going somewhere? Shouldn't he already be somewhere?
... where did he even work?
A weakness set him towards the kitchen table. He collapsed into a creaky chair and traced the circular stain in front of him with his index finger, his breathing a little erratic. He'd just had a strange dream, that was all. And maybe he'd been sick - maybe he was still sick. A sudden bout of amnesia was probably common somehow, to some people, somewhere, but if he didn't have everything figured out by noon he'd definitely have to call a doctor and schedule an appointment. Besides, he didn't feel ill, just out of place, like a chess piece on a checkers board, where everything seemed familiar enough to pass for normal yet different somehow, and there was that nagging feeling that he should have been somewhere else doing something very, very important, and each second he wasted here was a second further away from his destination.
"Breathe," he told himself. His voice was surprisingly clear against the thundering sound of autumn rain, and as if the command had come from someone else, he found it easier to fall into that rhythm of inhales and exhales, his focus turning inwards. As he felt himself calming down, he could sense another urge dawning from beneath the confusion: a drive to speak out his concerns, this mess of thoughts into some audible, tangible form. His hand felt about the table, blind as he was, until it hit a square object just as he'd expected it, and it fit in his hand perfectly as his fingers wrapped around it and brought it over. It was easy to sink down the record button, and as the tape started turning within, he found his breath releasing, becoming more steady and free than it had been until then.
"It's... seven in the morning. Seven thirteen, to be exact; it is raining. I'm not sure why I'm recording. Is this what I do? Is this - a form of journaling? I don't even have anything to say. I woke up fifteen minutes ago covered in sweat, and I think I had a nightmare. I can't remember a thing, but I feel like... I feel like I should remember. I feel like I've forgotten something important, something that I can't afford to lose entirely. That's not really the full truth. I feel like I've forgotten... everything. My whole life until now. Who I am. My name is Jonathan Sims. I live in London. I live alone, and I think something's wrong. I think I don't belong here."
The rain covered the whole of London. It reached even the underground, the echoing stations where the breaks of the incoming trains screamed through the shadows and the shimmering lights trying to break through the darkness that reigned the realm buried underneath the city, and even though the platform was packed with people, their voices sounded muffled and distant like they were far away from wherever Jon was, like there was a wall between them and him no matter how much he tried to break free. It wasn't a physical wall, and it wasn't an external one either, but this whole time he'd felt like he was moving in a fog towards a destination he wasn't entirely sure about, yet his feet were bringing him forwards and he was almost certain he was employed wherever he was headed, although he didn't really remember it, just felt it inside somewhere.
He was late, too. He should have been up earlier for this. Somehow, it... it didn't strike him as a problem. He didn't feel the rising anxiety within him that he assumed he should have felt at the notion of being late from work. The tube was packed, and the only dread he felt was something else entirely, something that he felt crawling up from deep within him, and it had very little to do with his schedule or even whether or not he was employed to begin with. It wasn't the consistent wrongness of everything about him either, not really, although it never left him at ease - no. This was a sensation that he felt all too familiar with, but couldn't place in time or reason with, yet every time someone looked at him, even if their eyes were merely passing by or through him like a ghost, he felt a jolt of fear within him. All of a sudden he didn't like the crowd anymore. It hadn't been comfortable before but now it was constricting... a space filled with eyes, not people but eyes that were watching him, eyes that saw him no matter the angle, eyes that perceived his every movement, and by the time he felt his station approaching, his breathing had turned shallow and fast and he stumbled out the opening doors as if drunk. Someone caught him - a woman - he apologised, but only in passing, because her eyes on him felt like they were burning holes into him.
That was how he made his way out of the underground. On the way up the escalator, which he felt he was climbing like a frantic animal, he caught the smell of burning and it alerted something further inside him that he couldn't place, and he thought of the train leaving somewhere behind him, heading for yet another dark tunnel under London. He didn't know exactly where it was headed next, but he was glad he was out of it; he wasn't sure if he could take another minute underground.
The rain had gone nowhere in the few minutes he'd spend travelling. When the tunnel finally ended he was standing in a street again, yet another street in London that looked exactly like any other, its sides lined with small boutiques: a bookstore, a craftstore, a store selling bags and shoes, a hair salon. He had to catch his breath there, his eyes staring emptily into the river of rainwater running at his feet.
Were all his mornings like this? Slowly, Jon reached into his pocket and brought up his phone; it had been thirty minutes since he'd left his flat, or the flat that pretended to be his and which he pretended was his in turn. It felt like a lot more time had passed - like he'd been trapped in that train for hours - but here he was, breathing fresh air in the rain, and although the street was positively flooding it was not flooded, and nothing was really out of the ordinary at all. His ears were ringing: maybe he did need a doctor. Blindly, although he was now looking forwards and trying to ignore the fact that everywhere around him other eyes were seeing and they were seeing him, he started to move again. Forwards and forwards he went towards a destination he wasn't quite sure about until he hit it: the Hope Foundation Library. Did he work there? He pushed through the doors and entered a silence.
The moment Jon was inside, the feeling of being watched left him. He now noticed for the first time that he was dripping wet, and maybe that had been the reason he'd felt so many eyes on him the whole journey. He didn't have an umbrella, he didn't have a raincoat, all he had was his dripping wet hair with water running down to his dripping wet shoulders and the nagging feeling of having very recently been very, very lost, but here, he finally had a feeling that he'd arrived somewhere - somewhere he was meant to be. He ran his hand through his hair and took a deep breath to shed the shakiness from his limbs, and the dusty smell of books filled his senses in a single wave, replacing the smell of the weather outside and the streets it was washing clean. Still he hesitated when he took his first steps inside, wandering through the rows of bookshelves towards the back of the labyrinthian hall: here and there sat men and women reading books or writing down notes, and in one corner, huddled in a large green bean bag chair, lay a woman with a book in her hands next to a little boy.
Not one of them was looking at Jon as he passed, quietly and hoping desperately to remain as unseen as he was. His prayers were answered. No one lifted their gaze.
"Hey, Jon," a female voice called just when he'd concluded he was invisible. "You're late."
Jon jolted, but although the surprise was uncomfortable, he found it relieving at the same time. If someone here knew his name, then he belonged here. He turned his gaze to find a familiar figure: Basira Hussain stood there, leaning to a bookshelf next to a basket full of recently returned books she was filing back in order. Her eyes didn't feel as piercing as those of the strangers outside. He didn't feel so seen under her watch, simply regarded, and the sensation was much more pleasant than that which he'd experienced in the tube.
"I know," he said simply. What else could he have possibly said without raising alarm and being instantly turned back into the downpour to see a doctor for his sudden-onset amnesia?
"That's it? No explanation?"
He shook his head.
"Fine," Basira sighed. She bent down to lift up her basket and offered it towards him. "This is yours, anyway. Have fun."
The basket was heavy and the smell of books inside it strong. Even though the aura of the library was peaceful, Jon was slowly realising that he didn't really like the books inside it. He didn't like or trust their look or their smell, or the way they felt when he held them, or the way they weighted down the basket. He looked down at them and wondered what was inside each of those covers. Should he take a look?
"What are they?" he asked hesitantly.
"What do you mean? They're books, Jon. You're in a library."
He sighed.
"That's not what I mean. I mean what kinds of books are they? Anything special?"
"Nothing more than the usual," Basira shrugged; she was squinting at him, although carefully, so that he might have not noticed if he hadn't expected it. "Returns and misfiles. Why do you ask? Are you looking for something?"
Jon shook his head.
"Nothing in particular. I'll - I'll get to it."
"Good. There's plenty more to go, which I suppose is my problem now. I'll see you around, if we ever bump into each other in here again."
Jon nodded, although by then Basira had already turned and was well on her way away from him. The basket in his hands grew heavier and he crouched down to place it on the floor. In the silence that now returned upon him he traced his fingertips over the backs of some of the books within, wondering if he was really looking for something in specific - if he was expecting something, something unpleasant perhaps, but he couldn't trace the thought to anything meaningful. He was beginning to notice however that quite a few thoroughly mundane things felt deeply unpleasant to him, and he couldn't help but wonder why; he'd felt this way not only about the books but about the rain, about the underground tunnels, about the train itself, and about all the bypassers who'd so much as glanced in his direction. Maybe he was having some sort of a mental breakdown: that would easily explain the amnesia and the growing list of phobias he couldn't reason with, such as the one he felt for the books now, although as he examined each and every one of them before placing them in their rightful spots in the shelves, that sense of fear gradually faded into the background. Whatever it was that he was afraid of picking up from the basket clearly wasn't there. These were just books: books about mammals, books about mysteries, books about recently divorced women on tours around the world, books about cooking and baking and knitting. Ordinary books. He felt like if there had been something that he was looking for, it wasn't ordinary. He would have recognised it, he was sure of it.
Working came to him easily, as if he'd been sending and putting books away his whole life. It was easy not to think about the nagging wrongness about him that he couldn't grasp at when he had his hands full, even though the rain outside never let go of the city, and even though its echoes haunted the silence of the library's hallways. It wasn't packed, but there wasn't a moment when it was empty, either: people came and went, faces changing for new ones every time another decided to end their studies for the day or found just the right books to check out, or when whatever they were reading was finally over, devoured from cover to cover. Jon watched them from behind his desk, his mind now slowly becoming just another vessel for the rain, its all-consuming yet subtle white noise backdropping his every thought. When he got up for a glass of water, however, he caught a glimpse of something that shed every little shred of peace from his mind that he'd managed to scrape together throughout the morning. In an instant his heart was racing and his limbs felt weak and he let out a soft breath that disappeared in the dull, soundless atmosphere of the library without a trace.
The man couldn't have been more familiar: his shape, huddled over a book with his hand wrapped around a cup of tea that he most definitely was not allowed to have near the books, was like second nature to Jon. His hair falling down his forehead, his soft gaze now sharpened over the lines he was reading, his aura of strange isolation and absolute focus... it struck out whatever had resided within Jon and replaced it with a desperate buzzing, a need to rush over to him and - and something, something.
Instead, Jon walked over to him, wondering if he was intruding - wondering if he was welcome.
"Hey, Martin."
Martin lifted his head. It took him a moment to focus his gaze but when it landed over Jon, a smile broke over his features and he looked... a little dazed, perhaps, but the solitude that had enveloped him a moment before seemed to fade and Jon felt like he'd been accepted into that little bubble with him. He couldn't help his smile, even though it felt stiff on his face. Was that just how he smiled in general?
"Hey, Jon."
Martin's voice played a sequence of memories in Jon's mind. They came in rushing like a river and he had a difficult time getting a hold of any single one, but information seemed to return to him unlike he'd felt all morning, the mist of amnesia breaking to let in just a sliver of light.
"I had a dream about you," Jon told him, although this was news to him, too, "Well - it was really just about you."
"Really? What was it?"
"You went missing. We were looking everywhere. I don't think I worked here, though. It was somewhere else. I'm... actually not sure who "we" were, either."
Martin chuckled quietly. He shifted his tea to the side and let his eyes rest upon it, and Jon could see the slightest hint of blush growing about his cheekbones.
"Dreams can be strange. I'm not missing, Jon. I've been here the whole time. Speaking of..."
He lifted his gaze back to Jon.
"How are you feeling?"
The dreaded question. Jon let out a small breath and shook his head, the smile on him turning ever more stiff.
"I'm fine. Other than for, well, I'm still... damp."
"Forgot your umbrella home again?"
"Seems that I did."
"You'll catch another cold," Martin warned him, "You should really try to take care of yourself more."
'Another cold' seemed to imply he'd already had one, Jon noted. It should have been a crucial crumb of information for whatever the hell had happened to him before, but he couldn't bring himself to believe it - he didn't feel the way he would have if he'd had a cold or indeed been ill at all. He felt perfectly fine. If he'd been the one missing, well, it was something else entirely. He lingered for a moment before realising he didn't have anything else to say and the silence was stretching, so he made a move to turn back, then hesitated; he didn't want to go. He wanted to say something more, but the things he wanted to speak of were locked in that fog that never shifted, no matter the little holes his memory of his dream had poked in them. Should he tell Martin about that - the whole thing about the amnesia, the fact that he couldn't really remember where he'd been the past week, or even really past that? The fact that he really couldn't remember working in this library ever before, even though it was clear he'd been employed for a while now? He decided against it. Martin didn't need to know that he was going crazy. It wasn't Martin's problem. He was just... trying to do his work - reading books and drinking tea on top of them.
The corner of Jon's mouth twitched.
"You know you're not supposed to have that anywhere near the books, right?" he said then, his voice caught between the tones of low, growly amusement and the stern seriousness with which a superior would address an employee. He assumed he was in a higher position than Martin, though where this assumption came from, he wasn't sure; either way, Martin's eyes darted towards his tea again and he grimaced with embarrasment.
"Yeah, I... I know, I'm sorry, Jon. I was just - it's a good book. I felt like it needed a cup of tea to reach its full potential."
"What are you reading?"
Martin flipped the book closed, his fingers between the pages where he was reading. The Historian, the title read.
"It's about... vampires, I think. I'm not far enough to know for certain yet, but it was in the fantasy section, so..."
Jon nodded.
"Just - don't spill any on it, alright?"
Martin looked at him with a small smile and nodded.
"I'll do my best."
It was with that that Jon turned to leave. He didn't manage to move further than a few feet before turning around again, if only half-way.
"Hey, Martin?" he called.
"Yes?"
"Since when have you called me 'Jon' anyway?"
"Oh," Martin answered, and now the blush on his cheeks was clearly visible. "Do you - do you want me to stop? I - I mean, I can just call you Jonathan, it just - I guess it felt natural? I don't know. I'm really sorry."
"No, I... I like it," Jon admitted. "I just - I don't remember you calling me that before."
"Yeah, it's... I don't know. I'm... I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"Alright. Well..."
"Well, yes."
A silence.
"I'll be - getting back to work, then," Jon broke it with. He felt rather ridiculous standing there now.
Martin nodded; he had a smile on him that looked a little melancholic in a way that made Jon wish he could mend it, but even as he turned away from it he felt his own smile softening. He couldn't help it, but he did scold himself for it. They were coworkers. Casual friends at best. That was it. He had no business feeling this way about Martin, like he wanted to reach out to him and brush his cheek to make his smile brighter - but it wasn't something he could reason with. The fog inside his mind wasn't lifting, yet he knew this wasn't the first time he'd faced these feelings, and he didn't find himself at all surprised by them, only defeated. What good was this knowledge to him? So he was pining over his coworker, his subordinate, whom likely didn't even have the potential to be interested in a man to begin with. Maybe he would have been better off forgetting that and remembering something that didn't involve one-sided feelings, like this supposed cold that he'd been suffering the past week.
The more he thought of it, the less he believed he'd had a cold in months.
The rain was still coming down in the late afternoon. Jon pressed his back into the Hope Foundation Library's cold stone wall and stared into the distance with his arms crossed over his chest, measuring the distance between himself and the tube station, calculating silently which way would spare him from getting drenched, if any. He didn't want to go back in the underground - the very thought of it filled him with a sense of impending doom and the lingering smell of burning entered his nostrils whenever he let his thoughts dwell on it for too long, but he was very determined not to give those thoughts much room, or as little as he humanely could. It was just the tube, he told himself; people travelled it every day without issue. No burning, no... crushing, or whatever it was that his imagination kept offering to him. No need to think of the weight of the ground above and around him, the suffocating pressure of it when the tunnel collapsed, or when it would grow smaller and smaller around him like a tight cave through which the train was trying to squeeze through, its frame bending with the deafening, thunderous screams of metal folding in on itself.
No need to think of any of that, and yet, here he was most certainly thinking of it.
He shuddered. So he was claustrophobic, then; if so, then what was the word for someone who feared the rain? This wasn't a storm and there was no thunder, yet the very sound of the rain itself was something that unnerved him, and he couldn't truly stop himself from measuring the rivulets of water rushing down the sides of the road. Was it growing? Was it deeper than it had been before? Were the sewers still drinking the excess, or was it pooling there, waiting for more and more to come down until it would flood and submerge everything? Submerge him, the library, the city... the whole world? Would it ever stop? He feared that it wouldn't. That was just it - he was afraid that the rain would never cease, and that eventually, the earth would be quenched. As if he'd never experienced rain before.
His eyes had glassed over, and the distance between him and the underground station had grown into a half-processed memory. It took him a while to notice that his fingertips were clawing over the pockets of his trousers, looking for something and finding a shape that he didn't remember being there before - a square, a solid square that pressed into his thigh as he opened up the mouth of the pocket and fished it out. It was a tape, presumably for the recorder he had at home, but it had no identifying label on it and Jon was almost certain it was empty, but he wasn't sure it had been there the whole day. Surely he would have noticed it at some point, or began to absently touch it like he'd done now, but what was the alternative? He slipped it back in his pocket and waited for something, perhaps for the rain to end. It kept pouring, and the cars kept passing, and the pedestrians kept walking past him with their umbrellas keeping them dry. None of them seemed to be concerned about the impending flood that Jon was all but certain was coming now. He tried to calm himself again. Even if the city was going to flood, there was nothing he could do about it, and if he didn't want to take the underground, he'd have to walk.
And walk he did. At first, he was fairly confident which route to take, but the longer he walked (and the more wet he got), the less he recognised his surroundings. There was nothing unusual about that, and it wasn't even because of the memory loss that had left him fumbling for the most mundane details of his existence, but he'd simply never walked the whole way back. Maybe he had a car, or maybe his claustrophobia was something he'd developed out of the blue with the fog that denied him access to his prior life, but the way back home was long like a journey and in the rain it felt doubly so: he had to stop a few times to search up a map on his phone, trying to decipher which way to head before the raindrops made the screen illegible. It took him nearly two hours to reach his destination, and by the time he was climbing up the steep staircase to his apartment he was shaking with cold and his legs barely bent from the chill, and yet he felt achieved, almost proud of himself for making it all the way back there without submitting himself to the tunnels snaking beneath the streets. In some twisted sense he'd beat the game. Certainly, he'd been stared at by some pedestrians he'd passed, but in comparison to the amount of eyes that moved upon him and the gazes that swept him through in the tube, those few glances were nothing. Yes, he'd looked like a miserable stray tomcat slinking through the wet streets like that, and yes, it was pointless and absurd to choose walking in this weather over the comfort of public transport, but hadn't he won? Wasn't this a victory?
He closed the door behind himself and began to peel his wet clothes off his body like thick strips of skin. Once down to nothing but a pair of comfortably warm pyjama pants, he had only one destination in mind, and he reached it with the slippery tape from his pocket in hand. He placed it next to the recorder and continued where he'd left off from there.
"It's now - it's almost seven in the evening. The rain's still going. Did I say I don't know what I'm supposed to say, or why I'm recording in the first place? I have this... drive, this urge, to record, but I don't know what I'm recording, not exactly. My voice? My thoughts? The remarkable events that didn't happen today?"
He paused for a moment, and the tape recorder's whirring was the only sound beyond that of the rain. It was now coming down harder again and he was almost certain he'd heard thunder a minute ago, but it had been far away, too far to be certain. He closed his eyes and crossed his hands on the table.
"My name is Jonathan Sims. I live in London. I live alone, and I'm a librarian, or at least no one threw me out when I pretended to be one today. I work with Basira Hussain and Martin Blackwood. I'm afraid of everything. This is what I know about myself. I'm - I'm in my thirties. That's... it, I suppose. A miserable amount of knowledge for someone who's supposed to be me. I promised myself I'd go to the doctor if my memory didn't return by noon, but here I am, and I haven't made a move to get myself an appointment or go to the hospital. Instead, I've made my way through the day pretending I know what I'm doing. I don't.
Let me describe something else, like the way I feel about the rain: I have this nagging fear that it won't end. That tomorrow, I'll wake up alone in this apartment, and everything else will be gone. That it'll flood everything, and there's nothing I can do. I fear that the underground will collapse on me, so I walked home in the storm. It took me two hours or so - I'm not sure. I wasn't taking time. I just walked. Half the time I wasn't sure where I was going. Have I always lived here? God, I have so many questions, and not one answer. The worst thing is, I... don't think I'm concerned enough about any of this. Sure it's uncomfortable, and definitely inconvenient, but I'm not overly bothered by it, not the amnesia, not the fears... not the fact that I don't think I should be here at all. I just am, and it seems that I'm somehow content with that. I know I shouldn't be. I know I should be afraid of that - not the rain or the public transport, but my own condition, my... paranoia, or the fact that I might be having delusions, some kind of a breakdown. And yet it really doesn't worry me too much. I've accepted it. I never struggled to accept it, discounting those first few minutes this morning when I woke up and I knew everything was wrong somehow.
I feel like the more I remember, the more I'm forgetting. That whatever knowledge I should be having is being buried underneath the information I'm taking in. I'm a librarian. It didn't sound right when I first said it, but I've accepted it now. I live in this apartment. Yes, I'm sure I do. So why did I question it a moment ago, and why don't I question it now?"
He paused again, but this time he didn't return to the tape immediately: instead, he picked up the recorder and put on the kettle.
"I like tea," he stated then, "There was a stain on the table this morning. It's... yep, it's still there. Alright. I knew that already, that I like tea, it's the kind of a thing you just know about yourself, but I have proof that I've always liked tea, or at least before this morning. I - I know I'm... I like men. I think I do like women, too, but I didn't think about that much today. Instead, I seem to have feelings for my coworker, Martin. That's something I should know about myself, isn't it? And yet I didn't remember Martin existed until I saw him in the library today. I wasn't thinking of him once before he was there. You'd think I'd remember something like that."
The natural light was fading, and with the clouds covering the sky, it was by now almost gone entirely. Instead, the street lights glowed from down below, their light bouncing from the mist and the frames of the kitchen window, and Jon watched those reflections for some time before continuing.
"I felt something was missing this morning. I felt like I was supposed to live with someone, to wake up next to someone, to share breakfast with someone. Did I have another dream about him? Something else than the dream he went missing in? He seemed to know me well enough when I came to him. He wasn't surprised to see me, or at least I couldn't tell that he was, and certainly not like I was surprised to see him. Why am I recording this? What's so important about this that I have to recount it?
I'm going to have a cup of tea and then I'm turning in, and by God I hope that I've recovered by tomorrow. I don't want to go another day feeling my way through like I've gone blind. I don't want to have another person appear out of thin air into my life while my heart tells me they're the most important thing I've ever reached for. Should I... should I talk to him more? Should I talk to someone - about this, or about anything? I don't feel like I talk too much. Maybe all I do is record my thoughts and avoid other people. That's another thing that I hate... that makes me feel afraid: being watched. I don't want to be seen. By anyone. I just want to be left alone."
He sighed.
"End recording."
The kettle was whistling, and its whistle almost covered the sound the tape recorder made when Jon pressed the button to stop it. Without it, he felt alone again - unnaturally alone, like he hadn't truly been on his own in years.