I: The Pale Woman

Around this time last year, a peculiar and somewhat unsettling thing happened to me.

It was a crisp January evening, and I was walking home from a café. I was nearly there when I came across a young woman with white hair who seemed to be looking for something. She was turned away from me, and in curiosity—I didn't recognize her, and I have lived on that street for the entirety of my adult life—I tried to get a better look at her face. She froze up for a moment. I cannot seem to recall what happened after that, though the distinct and almost haunting impression that I lost something in the encounter refuses to leave my mind. Certainly, I cannot remember what her face looked like, other than that she had golden eyes.

For a long time, I felt my inability to recall what it was that I lost to be vexing, even infuriating. By now, though, that has given way to sorrow.  There are so many things we lose over the course of our lifetimes, but the worst are sentences that slip our minds before we could speak them, stories we wrote long ago and cannot find again, songs where we can remember only a fragment we cannot look up in any index or on any website. The pieces we lose when we are broken apart.

No matter how carefully I read and reread the journal of my memory, I cannot find even the blank space where the words she stole were meant to be written. I only know that something is gone, and it is tearing me apart.