Ruthless Amnesia
he said, his voice breaking slightly, "why let me believe you were lost. Why let me sit beside your bed explaining your own marriage back to you like a stranger."
I sat down heavily across from him, my hands pressed together, trying to find some way to explain something I barely understood myself.
"Because the amnesia was the only version of me that ever let itself be gentle with you," I said. "Do you understand what I'm saying. Not the injury changing who I was. The forgetting itself, becoming a kind of permission I'd never given myself before. I could hold your hand without the weight of two years of guilt sitting behind it. I could ask if I'd been good to you without already knowing, with