I live a pretty disconnected life. It’s not just that I feel somehow cut off from myself or some parallel psyche, but here at the Institute I’m dissociated from my family and everything familiar, both physically and mentally, for I also don’t remember much of my past: how things are before I move here and become a narrator or even what kind of person I am in that other life. I do feel it as an influence upon my actions (I suppose you could call it my “character”) and there are moments when I remember my self fully and unmistakably. But just as in my narrations, the knowledge comes as a feeling which never fully translates into thought, and so there is no way for me to remember it when it’s gone.

Apart from my copious alone time, there are regular meetings with the doctor and a few rather strange encounters with Jody, who is the only other person I know who does the same work as me—though we never discuss narrating and prefer to dance around all issues of consequence, possibly because our lives are almost entirely focused on such serious things.

The first time Jody comes to visit me, she wears shorts with a long sleeve, semi-formal top, an almost amusing outfit except for the way it fits her and the nature of our relationship, that is to say, all of my secret feelings, my dreams and the almost mystical power she has over me. I’m not a believer in love, as it were, but being around her makes me wonder if that even matters. The feeling that overcomes me when I open the door of my flat—to find her standing with forced assurance slightly closer than societal standards recommend and an almost angry look on her face—crowds most of my beliefs right out of my head. I feel like I have been swiftly and soundly beaten at something by someone who far outmatches me: breathless, helpless, and a little humiliated. She says she would like us to be friends. I agree. I ask her inside.

We talk for a while, not about anything important, but our conversation resonates with indistinguishable yet powerful undertones; every word and expression is a puzzle piece to some mystery, some picture of her which is important to me for some reason.

There is something severe about Jody, evident even in our shallow conversation: a certainty of her convictions, a strength of will that despises its antithesis. When Jody makes a statement, even something small, I have the sense that it is really meant, that it has been considered from many different angles and probably revised from its original incarnation; and if I really listen to the words and think about them, whether or not I entirely agree, I see truth in them—at the very least a truth about her—she paints with every phrase and expression a picture of her mind and heart and, out of some sort of artistic pride, is unequivocally averse to painting a falsehood, covering a blemish out of vanity or depicting anything other than her true, uncensored feelings. And I think it is this quality of hers that inspires such awe in me, and fear—I have very little of that kind of strength: a jumble of uncertainty and indecision, and I’m wondering all the time if this is evident to her.

But though she can’t possibly fail to observe this disorder in me, for I also have too much pride to hide it completely and likely couldn’t if I tried, I get the feeling as we talk that she has no wish to scrutinize me, that she takes little satisfaction in her strength but that it rather works against her most of the time. I can imagine her microscope pointing its scrupulous lens ever inward. Yes, she is a self-flagellator. Still, I can’t help liking her for it—it’s not artless negativity, nor are her standards unreasonable. She just sees everything closer.

Jody, like me, is a loner in this environment; neither of us has any friends to speak of; neither of us wants to talk about the past—maybe she doesn’t remember hers either. But we talk about dreams, though I of course, leave out certain details; and we talk about art, in its various forms—Jody loves to read, though consequent of her severe nature, her list of “good” books is remarkably short—and we talk about what we love and hate respectively—Jody prefers sunset and I sunrise, but we agree that high noon and midnight are equally terrible; Jody loves the desert and claims to fear the forest and would never willingly climb a mountain; we both love the ocean, but Jody says it’s not meant for swimming or sailing but as a boundary for the land.

And though everything she says and the words, gestures and expressions she uses to say it seem all the while like puzzle pieces to her mystery, I become increasingly distracted during the course of the visit, by the more immediate mystery of why her words and expressions matter so much to me. Is it loneliness? Why do I feel so urgent?

Fortunately, there comes a pause in both words and expressions, as inevitably happens, and as her eyes take a vacation in my living room, my mind is able to think in broader terms than moments, gestures, words and expressions, and so I am suddenly struck with the name of the quality about her which I had until now been unable to place. Probably our limited contact along with my nervousness in her presence has kept me from looking at her carefully before, but in that moment it is quite clear that she is familiar to me.

The memory seems to be on the tip of my brain, like a dream which one has forgotten a second before, but as with the dream, concentrating only serves to wake me up more fully and sever more completely my ties to the consciousness in touch with the memory. And immediately thereafter, the conversation begins again, or rather the epilogue to the conversation: something about, sorry to stop by so out of the blue, no—not at all it was great to chat really please stop by any time, you know I live not far from here, Oh yes I’ll have to visit sometime, that would be great well—see you around.

When she leaves, some long dormant loneliness awakens and whispers to me of things lost in childhood, things impossibly out of reach to my present self, long dead and until now forgotten, memories of feelings without their context, and of that guilt which never entirely leaves but only recedes to a dull ache for periods of time.

So I take one of the pills which the doctor has given me for when I have trouble sleeping…