Remembering Sunday

It'd been a week. A week since I'd remembered Alex kissing me for the second time. A week since I'd called Michelle from the confines of a disgusting Shell gas station bathroom, sobbing hysterically into the phone and begging her to come pick me up. A week of no longer understanding a single thing I'd learned about myself in the two weeks prior.

It'd been a week since I'd seen Alex. Or anyone I'd been re-introduced to for that matter. A week of ignoring his texts, rejecting his calls, and having my father answer to door anytime he showed up at it. Having him tell the tall boy that I wasn’t home. It'd been a week where I'd done absolutely nothing but lock myself up in my room and pick at my nails trying to understand what everything meant. Refusing to see anyone except for Michelle on occasion. But even then, we mostly just sat in silence on my bed.

But the most frustrating thing of it all, was that it'd been an entire week week. A full week in which I remembered absolutely nothing.

And if it wasn’t a bitter enough thing to admit to even myself. You can imagine how difficult it had been to explain that to the neuro specialist I'd been sent to see that following Friday. Even for me, the one person who hates going to the doctors more than pulling teeth, the appointment was painfully short. As I had nothing new to talk to her about.

I drove home in silence. The entire drive in from the city I sat with pinched lips and a stone set scowl. Never touching the radio once. Just letting the same few agitated thoughts I'd been thinking all week circle around and around in my mind. The overwhelming presence of my defeat and disappointment being the only thing to accompany me on the journey from the passenger seat.

I was more than ready to head inside, climb the stairs and once again lock myself away from the world for as long as I could when I turned onto my street. Only for a displeasing sight to come into view. I should not have been shocked in all honesty, I should have seen it coming all week long. But regardless of that, when I pulled up next to an all too familiar gray and white truck, I was taken aback.

I turned the key with a little too much force and the engine died. I looked out my window to see the truck's owner perched on the small steps of my front porch. His knees propped up, head in his hands as he sat completely unfazed by my arrival. Not moving an inch till the sound of my car door slamming shut echoed across the stone path and up onto the wood panels he sat on.

I said nothing as I advanced, and neither did he. The two of us settled into the silence for a little too long. Me swaying on my converse as I stood just a foot from the boy, watching him stare blankly at his knees. I couldn’t see much of the elder, but what I could looked like crap. His hair was a wreck. Disheveled and tossed up in places it never should be. As though he'd been ringing his fists through the grease coated strands for days.

His shoes were untied and his socks didn't match and his clothing was wrinkled so bad I'd been convinced almost instantly he'd been in them all week. But none of that stuff seemed to match the drained look in his eyes when they slowly lifted into view. Not quite meeting mine.

They were dull and empty, vacant of the light I'd grown to recognize. Decorated with bold blue veins and heavy bags. They scanned me in the silence we'd created. Just seconds before it shattered.

"Nice shirt" was all he muttered, the words rough and quiet. The small remark not going any farther than that, as though he couldn't have thought of anything else to say to me. I watched him for a moment, my cold eyes waiting to see if his warm one's would ever raise to meet mine. And when they didn't after a moment, I looked down on myself.

I examined the shirt in the returning silence. Taking in the yellow and red swirls of the faded New Found Glory tee I'd pulled from the very back of my drawer. That last clean one I owned. Cringing to myself at the fact that in that week of nothing, I'd also been on my second week without laundry. And I could tell by its size that it was just big enough to not actually be mine.

Figuring instantly whose it must have been, I rolled my eyes and spoke up. "I don't forgive you." I said plainly. Wanting to stop him right there in his tracks of trying to strike up a normal conversation with me. Successfully blocking access to my door didn’t change how abnormal things between us still were.

And he sighed loudly at my words, rubbing his face with his pale hands. "I haven't apologized yet..."

"Still, I don't forgive you."

He scratched at the back of his neck, eyes slowly lifting more but still just shy of my own. "Please, just give me a chance to explain."

"What is there to explain, Alex?" I shot, my tone hardening from my ever-growing annoyance at the boy physically sitting between me and the sweet escape of my bed. I was in no mood to play around after the week I'd had. The week that he’d caused me to have.

"A lot, actually." He whispered, his tone shrinking more in response to my raised one. And his eyes finally locked with mine. Their once bright golden hue was nowhere to be found. Irises almost grey in color from the defeat that contaminated them. They were sad. That's the only word I could think of to accurately describe how they looked in that moment, pleading with my own. "Will you please just sit down so we can talk about this?"

"What's one good reason I should?" I questioned, my tone just as sour as before. And I watched as Alex took a shaky breath and shook his head. "What's one good reason I shouldn't just call up your mom and have her come collect you off my porch?"

"Because look at me Kennedy! I can't argue with you anymore please," He practically begged. "Will you please just sit down?"

His eyes lifted again after that. Color in them growing bright, but only at their edges where they pricked red. And it was some combination of those two things, the pain in his eyes, and the defeat in his words that broke down my hard exterior. Fracturing it just enough to cave.

I'd known all week that anger wasn’t what I'd felt toward Alex after remembering the kiss and arguing with him. I'd known all week that I didn't want to be avoiding and ignoring him, and that doing so was so far from what I would have done had I remembered everything. But I did it anyway. Not because I was angry, or felt betrayed, which to some extent I had. But because above everything else, I was afraid.

The thought of time going on and not remembering my life had been in the back of my mind since the moment I'd woken up in Arizona. It was my biggest fear of all when it came to dealing with my life after the accident. Having to process the fact that no matter what encouraging words my doctors or friends gave to me, that there was no actual guarantee that I would remember everything.

And realizing that all that I'd been remembering, and all that the people around me had been saying might not have been the truth. Was the worst thing I could have come to realize. It shook up everything I'd done up till that point. Made me question everything I thought I knew about myself to be true.

But the hardest part of all to deal with, was exactly what I was setting myself up to do as I slowly, and reluctantly lowered myself down onto my steps beside Alex. Because he knew just as well as I that I would never be able to understand the truth without him. And without my memory, I had no choice at all but to trust what he had to say. But, after discovering our confusing past, I wasn't certain anymore that I could.

Alex took a deep breath after we'd both had a minute or so alone in our thoughts. "I guess I just want to start out by saying I'm sorry..." He muttered, "I know you don't forgive me, and I'm not apologizing for what you might think, but still I'm sorry."

"For what?" I asked, keeping my eyes on my hands. "If it's not for what I may or may not be thinking."

"I'm just sorry that you're going through all of this, and that nothing makes sense..." His words were soft and slurred together ever so slightly as he blurted them out. I could hear the lack of sleep he'd gotten in his tone; the same one I'd been hiding in my own. "I guess that day I just kind of forgot that you don't know me anymore."

And it was that small ending remark that broke down the last of the wall I'd thrown up between us. It made me realize in just five words that I wasn't the only one in the situation who'd been hurt by it. 'You don’t know me anymore', it killed me. Because it was true. The memory I'd had on that hill with Alex was special. I didn't feel it anymore, but when I was remembering it I did.

Through all the annoyed looks and panicked thoughts that I'd had, even reliving it for just a moment in time I could still feel everything I'd felt and couldn’t even admit to myself back then. I held that moment close to me those years ago, regardless of what it defined us as, or what happened after. Which is a big blur to me now of course. It mattered, and still matters to me now. But there was more to the situation I'd been so blatantly ignoring.

One of those things I'd discarded being how Alex might have felt about the whole thing.

"So, I'm sorry..." He said again, making an assumption of his own from my silence which had me playing with my hands.

"I'm sorry I don't remember you." I whispered, my heart cracking inside my chest. It had been tearing me up for weeks that I couldn't remember those who once meant so much to me. But I'd never had to admit it to one of them until right then. "I wish I did. I wish I remembered all that you are or what we were, but I just can't."

"It's not your fault," He muttered and I felt him shrug against my shoulder. "I didn't mean to scare you off, I just wanted to help you remember something, anything. I didn't know it'd be that, and it would be that confusing for you to know it all again."

I nodded my head and bit my lip as I slowly mulled over his words. "It's not your fault either," I told him. Looking up to see the side of his head, brown locks of hair tossed in every direction. "You were only trying to help..."

I watched carefully as he ran another hand down his face with a heavy release of his breath. "Our friendship didn't always make sense to me either, you know." He admitted in a whisper, dropping his hands to press them onto the thighs of his grey sweat pants. "It hardly ever did completely."

My brows kissed. "What do you mean?" I asked, carefully and cautiously.

His head slowly turned at my curiosity, his eyes instantly finding mine already boring into him. Their soft color slowly starting to look more and more familiar the more I allowed him to talk. "Can I ask you something, before I explain?" He scratched nervously at a tuft behind his ear, thick brows raised. "If it's not too much?"

I just nodded hesitantly, "What is it?"

"How much do you remember of me?"

The question was simple in the most surface level of ways. A question I'd been asked a lot since I'd started to remember anything at all. By my doctors, by my father, even by Michelle. And it was a topic I'd always been eager to jump on the instant the possibility was presented to me. But as I shifted in a waiting silence on my front porch beside the boy I'd remembered most in my flashbacks. Something felt different.

"Well, I remember meeting you and the stuff with my fifteenth birthday, which you already knew." I started. "But I've had other memories too. Like my first one, I guess we were walking home from a party, or something, and you were so drunk you tried to break into your own house." I paused for a beat. Swallowing down around the lump that had begun to form in my throat and scratching at my forearm. "And I remember sitting on your porch before senior year had started, and the first day I got my license, and I recall a trip to the Honey Bee Diner with Jack and Zack. And I have vague memories of you playing me music in the tree..."

I stopped talking then, fumbling with the final memory I'd recalled on the tip of my tongue. But Alex was almost as quick to question my hesitation as I was to fail at hiding it. "What is it?" He pushed as I took a sharp yet shaking breath in. Averting my eyes from his.

"Then, I uh, remember you kissing me in my kitchen after a party sometime in the winter..." I bit my lip once the words had already escaped them, waiting impatiently for his response.

"Oh, wow..." He suddenly said after a moment or so. My eyes snapped upward to meet his. Taking in instantly the way their coloring looked brighter, even if just by a step. But his brows being raised made them crinkle at their corners. "I didn’t realize you'd remembered so much of me, why did you never say anything about all this?"

"Because it's still not everything." I shrugged, letting my eyes slide away from his once again. Blue orbs quick to start to count the freckles on my thighs to stall the bitter confession I was about to make. "It just feels like a bunch of false hope with all the pieces I'm still missing." I whispered to my knees.

I felt his hand shift to my thigh, halting my counting as I watched it give a light squeeze."I understand..."

I started to get the feeling he was just slowly starting to avoid the question I'd asked him before. So, I scratched the back of my neck awkwardly, "So, what else should I know?" I prodded. Trying to make it sound as genuinely curious as possible to not look as though I was just pushing to know more about what had confused me all week. Which in all honesty, I totally had been doing just that.

“I don’t know, exactly…” I felt him shrug against me once again, “We’d just never had what people would really consider to be a typical friendship.”

I placed my hand over the one he’d laid on my thigh. Silently signaling I wanted to know more.

“I don’t know how to say it Kennedy,” He admitted under his breath, softly stroking my skin with his calloused thumb while he thought. “You and I were just different, from the moment we met, you were different. I could never explain it. Not even in high school.”

“Would you try?” I asked carefully, eyes never moving from his hand beneath mine. I bit my lip, “Please?”

Alex sighed, and his hand slid from mine and my thigh. Blue eyes instinctively followed it up to his face where it dragged the skin in its track till it eventually disappeared in his hair. He seemed to be thinking through his heavy breaths for a moment. I was staring at him now, intently watching the way his different thoughts shifted through his features in succession as they crossed his mind. An array of emotions coming to life and fading away within seconds from one another. Then, they halted their transformations and another sigh fell from his trembling lips.

“People always just used to say we were the most unlikely of friends.” He explained, his hand slowly falling from his hair and moving back to find mine. “You were sweet and wholesome, and I was always up to no good. For a while everyone, even you, thought my tendencies to goof off and skip class with Jack would rub off on you. That hanging out with me would change your studious ways and structured attitude. But that was quite the opposite of what actually happened. We’d had all but one class together freshman year. And because of that we just quickly adapted to spending every second with one another in those halls. It wasn’t long before you were just another part of our friend group. But people were wrong about us, I never changed you, but you sure changed me.”

There was almost a smile playing on his lips when he'd paused to lick them. I cocked my head at the boy, “How so?”

Alex laughed softly under his breath. “I’d gotten into this habit in middle school," He said, amused eyes turning to find mine, "You know, of taking bathroom breaks that were just a little too long or going to the nurse's office just to never come back. But that all stopped when high school started, and you showed up. We’d become a package deal, if you were there I was there, and Jack and Rian were always somewhere close behind.
“If you were in class, I was there, sitting right behind you. And if you were sick, I was skipping third period to bring you soup. You always scolded me when I’d climb through your window but I knew deep down you’d been lonely all day waiting for me to show. It was sweet and innocent and didn’t make sense to anyone why they’d never seen us holding hands or flirting in the halls. But those thoughts never crossed our minds.
“You were always a very good girl. You hardly ever broke the rules, always home before curfew, never having more than a beer or two at our parties. But you never once looked differently at me for not being like you. You were you, and I was me. And we were us. That’s just how it was.
“One night though, sometime after I got my license, I managed to get you to sneak out and meet me for a drive. You climbed out your window once you dad was asleep and met me at the corner of your street. We drove around all night just talking and laughing and it was around 3AM when I parked on the center of the Loch Raven Reservoir bridge and we sat on the hood of my truck.”

He stopped there. His hand absentmindedly began to fidget with my little fingers. I could see more words behind his eyes, contemplating being said about what followed next. So I gave his palm a light squeeze. “What is it?” I asked, sensing his heavy hesitation.

He looked down at our entwined hands for a second, then back up at me, something new beginning to swirl in his eyes. “That was the first night I ever kissed you.” He told me, an almost smile tugging at the edges of his lips. “It was just on the cheek. Nothing significant but I’d never done anything like that in any sort of a serious manner before. Only ever just playful pecks on your forehead. Or joking slobbery kisses in front of everyone just to make you squeal.
“I kissed you for real that following winter, and a few other times after that. We kissed more than any two friends probably should, and at times probably went a little too far. But it never became anything more. Neither of us ever tried to make moves to do so. We never even talked about them. They'd happen, we'd part ways and the very next day it was always as though it never happened at all."

He paused again after that. Almost unnoticeable remnants of the smile he'd had on his lips whilst saying all that. But I saw them none the less. Just like I saw the strange sparks in the back of his eyes, something I'd identified but couldn’t quite understand lurking in their complex colors.

“Oh,” was all I could manage out.

“I know it probably doesn’t make much sense to you.” He shrugged, looking down at our hands as he visibly contemplated each word he said with thoughtful consideration. “It never really made sense to me either. But I just felt like I had to explain to you regardless, that I wasn’t purposely hiding anything from you Kennedy. I don’t want you walking around trying to find answers that don’t exist. Because not even I have them for you, or even myself.”

I too turned my eyes away from his, following his actions and looking down at his fingers intertwined with mine. “I’m sorry I over reacted.” I whispered sadly. Half-hoping, he didn’t even hear me. He did.

“It’s okay, really. I can't even begin to comprehend how confusing this all must be for you.” He quietly said to me, calling my eyes back to his one last time. Bright streaks of caramel beginning to swirl through them as they squinted at me. “But Kennedy, please don’t block me out. I only want to help you.”

“I see that now.” I whispered when he paused for a breath. Staring up at his stubble lined jaw, watching the way he sucked his lower lip into his teeth and pulled. Nodding his head. “I’m sorry.”

Alex didn't give me a second to respond before he was releasing my hand and pulling me into him. His long arms wrapped around my small frame tightly and with ease. The hug was weird with how we sat side by side, forcing our bodies to bend in strange ways. But still it was nice. I could hear his heart beating away in his chest as I laid my head on his protruding collar bones. The consistent sounds bringing me comfort a hand found its way into my hair, and he spoke again.

“I was so scared all week that I’d lost the chance to know you again.” He confessed to me. The grip he had on my back holding me close as I shut my eyes. Afraid of the burning sensation his words had brought to them.

“I promise you, I’m not going anywhere ever again.” I whispered into him. My hand coming up and grasping tightly to the stretched fabric of his shirt. Trying to explain without words exactly what I'd meant by that.

And I think he knew exactly what I was getting at. The way his hold on me constricted just a little bit more. And the way his head buried itself into my neck. The damp skin of his cheeks brushing against the exposed back of my neck.

“Please don’t.” was all that he begged.

Notes