PROLOGUE: BEFORE I FORGET
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I'm writing this down because someone told me I should.
I don't remember who.
That's the thing about this — it doesn't take everything at once. It's polite about it. Picks things up one at a time like it's browsing a market stall. A name here. A face there. Last Tuesday it took the memory of my mother's laugh and I didn't even notice until she called me for dinner and I looked at her like she was a stranger for about four seconds.
Four seconds is a long time when your mother is watching.
I don't remember her middle name either.
I've been sitting here for eleven minutes trying to find it and it just... isn't there. Like a room someone moved out of in the middle of the night without leaving a forwarding address.
It'll come back. It always comes back.
...Usually.
My name is Fredrick Wilbert. I'm writing that down too because apparently that's something you have to do now. Names. Faces. Small things that shouldn't need to be recorded because they should just *be there —* the way the sky should just be there. The way breathing should just be there.
The way you should just *know* the middle name of the girl who turned your entire miserable existence upside down without even meaning to.
I have white hair and amber eyes and I once made a girl cry in the middle of the school cafeteria using only one sentence and a disappointing look.
I think there were summers. Three of them. I think they mattered more than anything else has.
I'm going to write them down before I lose them.
There was a girl. There were a few of them actually... which sounds considerably worse out of context than it actually was. But there was one in particular.
I'm going to write them all down.
Starting from the beginning.
Starting from the morning everything got complicated.
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*— F.W.*