“No, you’re not,” she says.
“I am,” I argue as we both undo our seat belts.
“Forgetit, okay?” Katy says, laughing at her own joke, but our laughter is strained and I wonder if her heart is pounding as hard as mine, her stomach turning as quickly, her mind racing as fast, as we climb out of the car and walk toward the clinic.
Minutes later, when the nurse comes to get me, I leave Katy in the waiting room, holding my phone and hers, since electronic devices are not allowed in the procedure rooms. Before I leave, my best friend gives me a look that is fearful and knowing and something else I can’t define: maybe regretful.
Why are we here?
Let’s get the hell out and go home.
But the nurse is waiting. She’s short and young, with a bright pink streak in her hair, and I follow her down the hall, clutching the pen and form I started filling out in the waiting room. She hands me a hospital gown and directs me to a changing room.
As I get undressed, I chant the same thing over and over in my mind:Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
If I did, I might run out of here. I might go find Katy in the waiting room, and I’d call her Katy instead of Beatrice, and she’d call me Addie instead of Kathleen, and we’d go to her house or mine and talk about music or Juilliard or NYU. I’d try to forget Zach by filling my mind with other things, other people, not by erasing him.
But what if that’s not good enough? What if I can’t get over this?
My chest still throbs from just the thought of him.
And yet, I can’t stop wondering if this is wrong. If this is stupid.
If I’ll regret this.
My heart is racing now, my palms are clammy with sweat, and panic is swelling inside me, rushing up.Don’t think, don’t think.
“Almost done in there, Kathleen?”
“One second,” I call back, but as the nurse’s footsteps retreat, I see the pen and clipboard with the form I should have handed her sitting on top of the clothes I just took off.
And despite the mantra echoing in my mind, I think,What if I hate myself for this afterward?
The nurse is back again, hovering outside, but I pull my jeans out of the pile of clothes, letting the rest drop. And I don’t put them on, because I don’t think I’m strong enough to live with this pain, because forgetting is still the easiest way to move forward.
But I turn my jeans inside out and start to write, scribbling as fast as I can.
I write all I have time to. All I can think of to say to the girl I wish I was, a girl who I hope will be a little braver than I am.
“Dr. Overton is ready whenever you are,” the nurse calls, and then I am picking up my clothes again and opening the door and I am handing the nurse my form. “You’re going to be okay,” she promises me, and smiles in a way I don’t want to forget. Another woman takes a scan of my brain, a baseline scan, she calls it. And then my nurse with the pink-streaked hair is back, leading me to a room where a doctor in his sixties shakes my hand and explains what’s going to happen. The sedative, the side effects.
“How does it work again?” I ask in a moment of panic, stalling. I expect Dr. Overton to be annoyed, but he clearly never tires of talking about his life’s work.
“Well, every time any of us remembers something, we don’t just pull it out of the box and then put it back. We’re actually reforming the memory of that thing. It’s like every time you open a document on your computer and make changes—you save it anew. You write over the file every time you access it. Same with memory—anytime you access a memory, you write over it and then re-save it. We call it reconsolidation. And I think that’s why sometimes it feels like we’re reliving things that we remember. We are constantly re-creating or re-saving memories in our mind.” I nod and think of every memory of Zach, of how it feels too real and too much. “So what we do is we ask you to start off thinking of what you want to forget. You access it so we can locate the neural connections involved, and then we interrupt the reconsolidation process; we interrupt the process so the memorydoesn’tsave. Does that make sense?”
I nod again as I lie in the bed, gripping the sides to stop myself from running out. I think of Katy in the waiting room, my mother at work, my father somewhere far away.
And Zach.
Before I forget him.
His hair, his smile, his scent, his laugh, his movies.
“Let’s start with the day you met him. Do you remember that?”
I think of the heat the day I rode over to At Home Movies, pushing the door open, a boy with twinkling eyes springing out from behind the counter.
Zach,the boy I love.
