What I Should Never Have Remembered

There was no ground beneath my feet. No air in my lungs. Nothing I could call reality. Just a strange sensation, as if I were suspended in something that wasn't quite empty, but wasn't matter either. A fog without weight, without direction.

I tried to breathe, but there was no oxygen. Or maybe I didn't need it anymore. No heartbeat in my chest, no cold, no heat. And yet, I was aware.

A thought filtered through my mind like an echo of something lost: Am I dead?

But death should feel different. Not like this.

Then, it happened.

The nothing began to bend, to distort around me, as if the void could no longer hold itself together. Distant silhouettes emerged from the darkness, blurry at first, then clearer. Figures from a past I didn't remember forgetting.

A hallway. White walls. The flickering of a fluorescent light above. The smell of disinfectant and burnt metal filled the air.

And a sound.

At first, faint. Barely a murmur behind my skin. Then, louder. The heartbeat of a heart that wasn't mine.

My feet hit the floor with a thud. I staggered, dizzy. My body, which only moments before had felt weightless, now felt like it had been dragged from the depths of an ocean. I brought a hand to my head, trying to grasp what I was seeing.

In front of me, a door.

It was gray metal, no windows, no marks. But I recognized it. Or at least, I thought I did.

Something inside me screamed that I shouldn't open it.

But my hands were already on the knob.

The door gave way with a snap and slowly creaked open, revealing the room beyond.

And there she was.

Ana.

Or at least, the shadow of what she once was.

I froze, staring at her. It was her, yes. But not in the way I remembered. Her figure, once full of life and energy, now seemed like a broken silhouette, fading into the dimness of the room. The weak light filtering through the door illuminated her features, but not in the warm, human way I remembered. There was something distant in her gaze, something lost.

My breath quickened, but my feet stayed rooted. What was she doing here? How was it possible she was standing in front of me when everything in me told me she shouldn't be?

"Ana?" I called, my voice trembling, as if by saying her name, I might break what was left of her.

She slowly lifted her head, as if the sound of my voice had pulled her from a deep sleep. Her eyes, those eyes that once shone brightly, now were empty, dull. Yet there was something in them that made my heart ache, something I couldn't quite understand.

"What… what are you doing here?" Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet it echoed in the air like a silenced scream.

"I've… I've been looking for you," I said, stepping forward cautiously, as if afraid that by getting too close, she would vanish before my eyes. "Don't you remember me? I'm Eduardo. Do you… do you remember what happened?"

Ana didn't answer immediately. She stood there, watching me as if she were deciding whether to recognize me or not. Her face, so close to mine, felt both familiar and strangely alien. A sense of helplessness gripped me.

"I'm sorry," she finally said, and those words, so simple, cut through me like a knife. "I don't know who you are."

The words fell between us like stones, and with each one, the bond I thought I'd shared with her unraveled a little more. It was as if it had never existed.

But something inside me rebelled. Something told me I couldn't give up, that I had to keep searching, that I had to remember, that I had to…

"Listen, Ana, I don't know what's going on, but this can't be it," I insisted, desperate. "You and I… we're something more. I know it. I feel it in every part of me. You can't forget me. Not after everything we shared."

She took a step back, looking at the floor, as if the words were too heavy for her. "No… I don't understand. But, if you say so, I'll believe you."

My words caught in my throat. How could I convince her of what we felt when I didn't even understand what was happening?

For a moment, the air thickened, as if everything had stopped around us. All that was left was the silence growing between us, suffocating, unbearable.

"What do we do now?" I asked, my voice breaking.

She raised her head, and for a moment, I saw in her eyes something I hadn't expected: a spark of recognition. But it was so fleeting that I couldn't hold on to it.

"I think… I don't know if this is real," she said, and her voice became even more broken, as if she feared the same answers I did. "But if it's not, maybe we should do what we've always done. Move on."

Move on. The phrase echoed in my mind, but I couldn't understand it. How could I move on if every step I took was pulling me farther from her? How could I move on when every time I looked at her, I felt like she was fading more and more?

What I should never have remembered… Now, how could I forget what was already in my soul?

What I Should Never Have Remembered (Continued)

Her words hung in the air like smoke, slipping between us, too thick to breathe, too thin to touch. Move on. How could I? How could I leave behind the echoes of what we were? It felt like the ground beneath me was crumbling, pulling me into a void where nothing made sense.

I watched Ana, her figure trembling in the dim light. She seemed so far away, her presence like a distant memory fading into the fog. My mind screamed for her, begged for her to remember, to reach out, to tell me this wasn't real. But she stood silent, as if the weight of the past was too much to bear.

"Ana…" My voice cracked again, and I hated how weak it sounded. I wasn't this person. I wasn't the one who begged for answers, who pleaded for something to be real. But there I was, lost in the broken fragments of something that had once been whole.

She didn't respond, her gaze fixed somewhere just beyond me. I took a step forward, my feet unsteady, my body unwilling to obey. Each inch felt like a battle, but I had to reach her. I had to break through whatever wall had been built between us.

The air grew colder. A chill that seeped into my bones, numbing me. I reached for her arm, but she flinched, pulling away just enough that I couldn't touch her.

"Don't…" she whispered, her voice fragile, like glass ready to shatter. "Please, don't do this. You don't have to."

I stopped, my hand hovering in the space where she'd been just a moment ago. The room seemed to shift, the shadows curling around us, mocking me. "But I do. I have to know, Ana. I can't just… let this go. Let you go."

She didn't move. She didn't speak.

In that silence, everything I had known began to fracture. The memories that once clung to me, the ones that defined us, were fading, slipping through my fingers like water. I could feel myself losing hold of them, of her. And in that moment, I understood. I understood why it hurt so much. I wasn't just losing Ana. I was losing myself.

"I can't remember," she said, her voice barely audible, as if she were speaking from a great distance. "I can't remember what we had, Eduardo. It's... it's all gone."

The words tore through me, more painful than anything I'd ever felt. They weren't just a denial. They were a death sentence. If she couldn't remember, if she had forgotten everything about us, then what did I have left to hold onto?

I wanted to scream, to shout, to break everything in my path, but there was nothing. Just the empty room, the cold air, and the woman who no longer recognized me.

"Please," I whispered, stepping closer again, desperate now. "Ana, please, don't say that. You—You have to remember. We had something real. We were something."

She finally looked at me, her eyes empty, hollow. The spark I had seen earlier had died, snuffed out like a flame in the wind.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice quieter now, more resigned. "But I don't think I can go back."

Something inside me broke then. Not with a crash, but with a slow, suffocating pressure. It was as if the weight of everything we had been together pressed down on me, and the more I tried to hold it up, the more it shattered.

I closed my eyes, swallowing the lump in my throat. My body felt heavy, as if the very act of standing was too much.

"Then… what do we do?" I asked, the words barely forming as they left my lips.

Her gaze lingered on me for a moment, longer than I expected. For the briefest of moments, I thought I saw something in her eyes—a flicker, a glimmer of what we used to be. But then it was gone.

"I don't know," she said softly. "But I think we're both lost now."

The truth of it hit me like a blow to the chest. I wanted to scream, to argue, to tell her she was wrong. But in that moment, standing there, I realized she wasn't. She wasn't wrong. We were both lost.

And there was no way back.

I turned away, the weight of her words heavy on my shoulders, my heart dragging behind me like a chain. The door behind me loomed larger, an escape that wasn't really an escape.

I could hear her breathing behind me, shallow and strained. I knew she was still there. Still real. But it didn't matter. We were already gone.

What I should never have remembered… was that it never really ended. Not for her, not for me. Not in the way we wanted it to.

And as I left the room, a piece of me stayed behind, fractured and forgotten, just like the rest of us.