Prologue

Nathaniel Moore

Empty. It was true, I felt empty. I wasn't filled with sorrow, anger, or any other feeling of any sort. I was just empty. I had always been different from everyone else. You see, I was born with a gift. The gift to eliminate all the memories a person has of me. Every touch, every feeling…anything that had to do with me. Gone. Everything completely forgotten with a simple meeting of my skin and theirs. All that's left is a vacant feeling. Like you feel you have forgotten something important.

I watch them as they try their best to remember. Did I forget to pick up my dry cleaning? Did I forget to turn off the stove? As much as they try, I know for a fact that they won't ever come to remember. In time they relinquish the desire to recall what they have forgotten, going on with their lives. They forget me. Thus, I am left alone. Alone with the burden of remembering. That is the irony of my life. As this so-called "gift"of mine rids any person of all memories of myself, whether accidental or intentional, I am left painfully remembering.

I used to be bothered with people around me forgetting. I used to sit alone in my bedroom crying perhaps because my best friend had forgotten who I was after he tripped onto me as we walked home. Or because my dog, whom I had spent years with growing up, growled at me as if I were a stranger after he had licked my hand out of excitement one day. After all those years crying, I accepted the fact that the long hours of solitary confinement in my room did not make people remember me, nor did it ease the pain of the actuality that they never will.

As time went on, I made a few friends here and there. As the same as the rest, they touch me-despite my hardest attempts to escape skin-to-skin contact- and they exit out of my life as quickly as they had entered. It no longer upsets me the way it did when I was younger. These recent years I am just left with a large void. A void that grows with each and every goodbye that is left unsaid yet is still understood. Friends coming and going is a natural occurrence in my life. Yet the pain still hits me as hard as it did the very first time. Every day I ask myself the same weary question. Will it ever end?