Memories Lost to Oblivion

Memories Lost to Oblivion
The Siege of Forty
Where am I from? Factually born in San Antonio. I grew up in Austin. However, that’s not where my story really starts.
Memphis, Tennessee—to the world, a city of music; a place of joy, to me, a monument to a stolen past. It is a graveyard for a life I wish to prune away, a sterile reminder of the childhood I surrendered to be “cured.” It is a second home I no longer want to visit. Yet every other year I’m forced to journey back.
I HATE it.
It began with a younger me, or so I’m told. A boy whose vitality was under a constant, predatory siege: Epilepsy. To describe it is to describe a literal oblivion. It wasn’t a rare occurrence; it was a relentless rhythm. Forty times a month, the world would simply cease to exist. And it feeds on him.
Think of that—more than once a day, every single day, the sun would be extinguished. My location, my actions, my very thoughts—plundered by a neurological shadow. I would wake hazy, a stranger in my own skin, asking the same desperate questions: “Where am I? What happened?” And with every lapse, another fragment of my history was eroded. It was a daily theft of my soul, a curse that refused to be sated until it had taken forty pieces of me every thirty days.
I remember a story I was told but have no recollection of. I wake up, look around the room, and wonder, Whose toys are those? My parents look at me heartbroken. They are mine from the Christmas just before. Another history lost to oblivion, to my neurological shadow.
The Clinical Trials
My family searched for a sanctuary and found it in Memphis. They found the white knight who will cure me. But the “cure” was a marathon of clinical trials that demanded years of my youth. I remember being surrounded by specialists who spoke a dense, impenetrable dialect of medicine—talking about me as if I were a puzzle to be solved rather than a boy.
The rooms held cold, unforgiving tools that made me wonder what I was truly in for.
I wanna go home is all I think. To something that’s familiar.
They glued leaden wires into my hair, binding me to monitors like a puppet. Finally, there was the machine—a claustrophobic, humming void where movement was forbidden. These were the trials I endured just to reclaim a childhood that was already slipping through my fingers.
The Stranger in the Mirror
The day finally came. After years of work, the sudden descents into the dark finally stopped. I left Memphis no longer a boy, but a hallowed survivor. I was free, but that freedom cost me the very years I was trying to save.
Now, I am haunted by a profound disconnection. People speak to me of a boy I don’t remember. They offer me “nostalgia”—pictures, videos, and stories—but I feel nothing. I look at the child in those photos and see a phantom. I have to nod and perform the role of someone who remembers, pretending I know the boy they are mourning. There is no warmth in these memories, only the cold realization that the forty-fold theft took him before the doctors could save me.
The Bitter Victory
I look at my past with a shattered gratitude. I am thankful the “Oblivion” is gone, but I loathe the city that holds the remains of my youth. I want to forget and move on, but the tether remains. I am forced to return to Memphis, to walk its streets and be reminded of the vacuum where my childhood should have been. I found my cure, but I lost myself in the process.
This is who I am: a boy who had to grow up early, a man who is not ready for the world, a vessel still looking for his soul.