The Memory Thief by Emily Colin Page B

habits, the smoking and the drawing, and he said sometimes when you’re in an accident like mine, other parts of your brain compensate for the ones that have been damaged.
Don’t worry,
he said.
Everything will be back to normal soon enough, and if not—well, artistic talent isn’t such a bad thing, is it, and I’ll just write you a prescription for Wellbutrin.
And then he laughed, which I did not appreciate.
    The next session we had, I told him about the sense that my life’s on hold, that it seems like there’s nothing to it. He said that was logical, that until my memories came back, it was natural that I’d be “a bit at sea.” This was not what I meant, exactly. It’s not that I don’t have things to do from one day to the next, or people to do them with. It’s that all of this stuff seems to add up to nothing. The sense of happiness I had when I was climbing, the rush of love for the dark-haired woman and the little boy, those things have weight. Compared with them, my day-to-day life seems meaningless, just a bunch of hours strung together.
    When I related all this to Dr. Green, he nodded his head. “Hmmm,” he said. “You’re not working right now, are you?” I told him that I wasn’t, that I won’t be teaching again until the fall. His brilliant conclusion was that my life lacks structure—that if I were in a classroom, I’d feel a lot more inspired. He recommended that I give myself some time.
    For all I know, he could be right. But when I think about getting up in front of a classroom full of high school students and talking to them about the American political system, I don’t feel a thrill of excitement. What I feel, instead, is dread. I don’t know if this is because I have no actual memories of teaching or planning a curriculum. I guess it could be plain old stage fright. The thing is, it’s not working with kids that turns me off, it’s the setting—the confines of a classroom, standing up in front of a group of students day after endless day, year after year. When I think about it too hard, I want to flee for the nearest exit as fast as my legs will take me.
    I’ve done my best to make sense out of this, poking around my life to see if I was planning to switch careers anytime soon. I asked Grace, and she said I was good at my job, that I had no plans to do anything else. I asked Taylor, and he said no, man, you liked it because you got the summers off and you could hang out at the beach. Then I asked Jack, and he gave me a blank stare. It’s a living, he said. You’re not supposed to love it. You do what you gotta do. The latter seemed like such a grim assessment, I resolved to never bring up the subject again. Maybe I’ve had a personality reassignment or something.
    I could handle all of this, I think, if it weren’t for the dreams. Last week, in an effort to get a grip, I drove out to Climb On!, an indoor rock climbing gym located in Wilmington’s outer reaches. I thought that maybe something there would resonate with me, that perhaps I had a secret life as a mountain climber and that’s why teaching social studies seemed tame in comparison—but that didn’t happen. I looked at the walls covered in multicolored holds, the dudes climbing upside down in what the front desk person told me was called the Cave, and shuddered. Not only was none of it familiar, but when I stepped into a harness and started making my way up one of the routes, I got vertiginously dizzy. By the end of my sojourn to Climb On!, I learned yet another new thing about myself: I do not care for heights. Not at all.
    So much for my secret identity theory. I’m back to pissing Grace off, drinking too much, and wandering around like one of Oliver Sacks’s prime case studies. In my spare time, I sit and picture the dark-haired woman, trying to figure out why her face calls up such strong