I remembered. The overdoses; the addictions; the blackouts; I remembered. The treatments; the medicines; Schizoaffective disorder; I remembered.

This silver orb had returned all the memory taken away from me. It was all suddenly clear, but how could my family do this? Clinically erasing my memories to ease the pain of murder? I felt horrible. For 13 years, I’d blamed everyone around me - only to find out that the killer of my husband had been his wife all along.

Guilt enveloped me like gasoline in my guts. Dying slowly in the toxicity, the fire burned so rapidly that there was nothing left inside me. Falling, I couldn’t find that one string of hope to hold onto, the one ray of light to awaken hope in me again. It was as if a knife cut through my stomach and the wound bled incessantly.

Shattered by flashes of blood, the color of my world slowly dimmed grey, and unfortunately, there was no mending the clouded cracks of a murderer.

I killed him. I remembered- I killed him.

Life: now a blackhole with no escape. So dark, so consuming, that even being alive was unbearable. Finally, the deep agony of feeling everything became an encompassing sigh of feeling nothing. Solace in the devastatingly beautiful relief of numbness. And in those moments of seemingly meaningless calm, I remembered how broken I’ll always be.

But how could emptiness be so dense? So dense, anyone who got close would be cut by the shattered pieces, burned by bitterness in the pit of my heart.

Crumbling to the ground faster and more erratically than ashes from a burning cigarette, I fell. And with me, the silver orb fell too.

The silver orb: a mystical object I found amidst the mesmerizing edifices in my late grandfather’s attic. Letting my curiosity get the better of me, against all rational judgment, I walked towards the orb, picking it up. And as soon as I held it, the holes in my memory I’d been attempting to fill for 13 years were solid. Instantly, I remembered.