“Aaron”, they told me. “Aaron,” the nurses reminded as they wrote the letters on a whiteboard in front of my bed. “Aaron,” the woman who came to visit lovingly called as she walked into the room.

I took the name in my mouth, moved my lips and my tounge to echo the sounds. But, my voice always tripped at the harsh cadence of the word, finding no familiarity in the sound. The writing on the board remained unfamiliar- despite months and months of inspecting the curve of letters and looking at the empty spaces in the name. The more I repeated the name, the more I studied the shape of the letters, the more frustrated I became.

Was I really Aaron? How could I not remember?

After the accident, I couldn’t remember. As the months went by, memories slowly began to seep into my mind - inklings of fear, heart racing, sweating palms, spiders crawling down the inside of my spine, and the constant need to run. I closed my eyes as hard as I could and clenched my fists in trying. Yet, “Aaron was never a slight memory.

I think maybe I began to stop trusting myself as the people who surrounded me - doctors, nurses, friends - were so convinced I would remember. I began making up memories, nodding to the memories of playing baseball in the park and fondly looking at the woman who came. Yet none of this was true, but my desperation transformed my mind.

As the days went by, the turned into weeks. And eventually 3 months later, I loaded into a wheelchair pushed by the lady who always visited, waved doctors away. I was now Aaron. But - who was I really?