Page 50 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

God, I wanted to speak.

But I was trapped behind a barrier I couldn’t see, couldn’t explain, and had no idea how to break.

That was when I finally understood.

It wasn’t my mother.

It wasn’t the person standing in front of me.

It was me.

I was the problem.

Something inside me was broken. Something I couldn’t name, couldn’t fix, couldn’t even understand.

So I had found a solution.

If I couldn’t give people the words, I would give them something else.

Something they could see. Something they could hold on to when my silence made them doubt what I felt.

With my mother, that meant becoming the son she could be proud of.

I studied until the words on the pages blurred together and my eyes burned from exhaustion. I learned how to smile when she showed my grades to her friends, even when all I wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep.

I didn’t care about being the top student. I cared about the way her face changed when I was.

So I kept doing it.

Football was no different. I could have spent those afternoons anywhere else, but I stayed on the field long after everyone else had gone home, repeating drills until my legs trembled beneath me. I’d drag myself through another sprint when my lungs were already burning, practice another shot when my feet were blistered and aching, then limp home and force a smile when she asked how practice went.

Every achievement became another way of saying what I couldn’t.

Every medal, every highest grade, every goal was something I could place between us whenever my throat locked up and the words refused to come.

When my girlfriend began looking at me with that same wounded disappointment after I failed to return her confession, I understood what I needed to do.

I couldn’t say it.

So I had to make up for it.

I spent days transforming the school auditorium to ask her to prom, hanging lights, arranging flowers, filling the space with every extravagant detail I could think of. It was excessive. Ridiculous, even. The sort of grand gesture I would normally have avoided without a second thought.

But if this was what it took to wipe that look from her face, then I could endure it.

When she walked in and saw what I’d done, her entire expression changed. The hurt gave way to surprise, then a smile, and the knot that had been twisting beneath my ribs finally loosened.

I remember the relief more than anything else.

And that was when I thought I’d finally figured it out.

Maybe I didn’t have to say I loved someone for them to know. I could prove it instead. I could give them the kind of gesture that spoke for me when I couldn’t.

The bigger the gesture, the harder it would be for them to doubt me.

When Alessia first said the words to me, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

I still remembered the exact rush of happiness that had gone through me. A smile had broken across my face before I could stop it, so wide my cheeks had hurt, and for one beautiful second, there had been nothing else in the world but her standing in front of me and the fact that she loved me. I had wanted to tell her how much those words meant. I had wanted to give them back to her, to finally say the thing I had spent my entire life struggling to say.