jurassicjack

Back in the apartment, I was determined to achieve some kind of clarity. I searched through the place for paper and a pen, to compare my handwriting.

I didn’t know what my own handwriting looked like. I had no recollection of ever having seen it. I had two possible clues to my identity (that is, if you count “for cigarettes” as a potential clue), and all I needed was to know if I wrote them or not.

I was a bit surprised I hadn’t forgotten how to write, to be honest. But as my hand, with a sense of automaticity and grace, flicked across the paper, it became evident that this wasn’t the case.

I was the one who had written Empires on my hand. Even though the letters were a bit clumsier than the ones I had just scribbled, and the marker it was written with looked like it had been about to run dry, it was clear that it was the same hand that had written both. And it didn’t take much logic to figure out that this meant that I was not the one responsible for the “for cigarettes” note. I began to realize what that had to mean: I was not the only one with access to this apartment.

Everything in the apartment was neatly placed, as if it had never been used. Like it was exactly how the decorator had wanted it to look for the spread in the IKEA catalogue. And yet the apartment had everything you could possibly need.

A Macbook Pro was sitting on the kitchen counter – I grabbed it and sat down in the couch. After the few seconds it took me to type in “Empires” and wait for the results, I was presented with what I can only describe as undeniably anticlimactic. Countless amounts of hits regarding Age of Empires - a videogame about war, basically – filled the page.

Doubting this was the clue I needed to prove my existence, I scrolled down, and finally found what could be what I was looking for. A band. Desperate for any kind of clue, I downloaded the album and waited.

I don’t know quite what I was expecting. But listening to the record brought back tiny fragments of memories – all from the same night. Glimpses of faces, of conversations, flushed in over me, and overwhelmed to the point where I started crying.

Regaining a lost identity might not turn out to be as easy as I’d expected.