Page 37 of If You Stayed

“I heard rumors about you,” Ava said one afternoon as we walked off the elevator to the fifth floor for our lunch break.

“That’s never a good intro to a conversation,” I joked.

“It’s nothing bad,” she argued, “Just weird. Is it true thatyou lost your memory?”

“That’s true.”

“Likeallyour memories.”

“Most of them, yes. Anything before I was twenty.”

“So, you’re telling me your whole memory is gone from when you were nineteen and younger? Like, nothing?”

“Yup. Nothing.”

“How is that even possible? You had to relearn everything?”

“A lot.” I nodded. “Some things were just instinct, I believe. But for a long time, it was hard.”

“And then you built all of this?”

“Uh-huh. I became highly focused on my career because even though everything else outside of me felt out of control, at least I had this thing that I could control. This building, my job, is my life.”

“What about your friends from back then?” she asked as we walked over to the buffet for the afternoon. A Mexican food spread from a local restaurant was laid out in front of us, and the smells were enough to make my stomach rumble. Ava seemed less interested in the meal and more interested in asking me a million questions about my memory loss. “Or girlfriends. Did you have a girlfriend? Did you lose your friends?”

“A few people reached out, but it felt very hard to connect. I ghosted a lot of the people because I struggled with being what they expected me to be. Others ghosted me. I didn’t blame them. It was a very dark period.” I handed her a plate. “Why so many questions on this?”

“No reason,” she said, taking the plate. “I’ve just never meta rich person who forgot half their life.”

I laughed. “What makes you think I’m rich?”

She glanced around and waved her hands at everything. “Dude. You have an arcade room at your workplace, a whole room with candy, lunch catered every single day, a meditation room,anda Ping-Pong table. Only rich people do that.”

“Touché.”

“Plus,” she started, “I googled your net worth.”

“Those numbers are always extra extreme.”

“You built properties for A-list celebrities and royalty in England. I doubt the numbers are fluffed.”

Turns out Ava must’ve read my résumé.

She grabbed a few soft taco shells and began to fill them up with chicken and fajita peppers. “So, you didn’t have a girlfriend before you lost your memory?”

“Not that I know of. If I did, she never showed up,” I joked.

“But you didn’t have some kind of feeling in you…as if therewasa person?”

I did. Often. I figured that was why I dated around so much and met up with so many different types of women. For a long time, I felt as if I was searching for something, but the older I grew, the more I realized the woman in my head only existed there. She was a figment of my imagination. I didn’t tell Ava all of that, though. It seemed too bizarre to mention to a fourteen-year-old.

“Sometimes, I get nudges,” I explained. “Hunches, I suppose.”

“Nudges and hunches?”

“Yes. As if something is familiar…but they don’t always lead anywhere.”

Ava frowned a little as she added toppings to the fajitas. “That kind of sounds like hell.”

---