Stealing from Klosterman 4

Q:

At the age of thirty, you suffer a blow to the skull. The head trauma leaves you with a rare form of partial amnesia -- though you are otherwise fine, you're completely missing five years from your life. You have no memory of anything that happened between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight. That period of your life is completely gone; you have no recollection of anything that occurred during that five-year gap.

You are told by friends and family that -- when you were twenty-five -- you (supposedly) became close friends with someone you met on the street. You possess numerous photos of you and this person, and everyone in your life insists that this individual was your best friend for over two years. You were (allegedly) inseparable. In fact, you find several old letters and e-mails from this person that vaguely indicate you may have even shared a brief romantic relationship. But something happened between you and this individual when you were twenty-seven, and the friendship abruptly ended (and apparently - you never told anyone what caused this schism, so it remains a mystery to all). The friend moved away soon after the incident, wholly disappearing from your day-to-day life. But you have no memory of any of this. Within the context of your own mind, this person never even existed. There is tangible proof that you deeply loved this friend, but -- whenever you look at their photograph -- all you see is a stranger.

Six weeks after your accident, you are informed that this person has suddenly died.

How sad do you feel?



This is the sort of situation that acts as a base for a romantic comedy or love drama. I think I love that about it. My first inclination is that I'd not really feel sad at all. I'd feel just about as sad as I would if I heard that a cousin of an acquaintance's friend had died. It's sad in a universal way, but there's no real personal connection. The photos and letters would be like getting to know a plot line from a television show. Seeing myself as a character. I imagine part of having five years of my life erased from my memory would be a lot like that.

Five years is a serious amount of time. In re-reading my thought emails from less than a year ago, I'm surprised at where my head was at. Five years ago, I was 18 years old, and I was in my second semester at Baylor. Where were you? How much would you have changed between now and then?

It would be difficult to see myself during that time as "me".

It's tough to even figure out what seeing someone else in my life would be like.

And now to reveal my insanity.

If I read through the letters, saw the photos, talked to friends about my relationship, I'd start to see myself and that close friend as characters the same I would any characters from a book or movie. And since it's me, I'd already relate to and love the main character, and most likely, my friend.

So I'd be about as sad about that friend dying as I would finding out that Edward Bloom from Big Fish was dead or Superman had passed. That is actually sadder than you'd imagine.

Of course we all know that Superman actually settled down with Lois Lane and changed his name in order to avoid the pitfalls of super hero life in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?".

But I digress.