Travel Fiction | Oaxaca: Amnesiac Abroad
Amnesia is abrupt. One moment you have a name—you are sure of it—and in the next you cannot remember who or where you are or what you do for work or if you have any friends or if your parents are still alive (though you assume you either have them now or once had, the nature of birth being what it is) or anything else pertaining to yourself for that matter. It is all just gone. Left behind the way a suitcase can be forgotten on a train platform.
You lower your gaze from the lather of stars percolating across the night sky and see that you are on a beach. Not the beach of a lake or a river or even a sea—it is an ocean beach. It has an unbound feeling to it.
Wherever the beach is, it is someplace remote. The sky is uncorrupted by the imposition of fabricated illumination. The only light issues from the stars and a rather large, potentially full moon, the reflection of these galactic torches casting a subtle incandescence upon the soft froth of the surf.
Seated on the sand cross-legged, through the darkness you can make out spires of rock formations wrought by the motion of water and wind and time lined up and down the shore like slumbering sentinels.
It is a peaceful place.
You don’t know when you arrived or how long you’ve been here. The passage from moment to moment is dubious.
Suddenly in the distance a lighthouse licks its beacon through the obscurity. You watch and attempt to use it as a landmark establishing your place among nature and the civilization of humankind. You fail.
It is rather astonishing, the completeness of the amnesia. You have heard of it before, of course, but have never understood how profoundly emptying it can be. Perhaps most outlandish is the fact that you can retain so much—the words for everything else, odds and ends from history, the very concept of amnesia itself—but at the same time contain not a glimmer of your own identity.
Ostensibly, its absence should be disconcerting. Terrifying even. You suspect that—faced with similar circumstances—the great majority would not handle it well. Or that perhaps they could, but that few would endanger themselves to the path of amnesia, the path of forgetfulness, in the first place. People cling to identities, even those for which they’ve no use, those that have abused them. You, on the other hand, know there is peace in loss. You know there is value in not knowing.
But, you suspect or know instinctively, with time the effects will go out like the tide, and in their absence your name and all that comes with it will return—birds resuming their place on an emptied tidal plain. For the interim, your surroundings are tranquil. You see no immediate means of forcing a remedy and no need for one.
The lighthouse laps at the night, reminding you of the existence of society, civilization, and culture. It makes you again wonder where you are, how you arrived there, and what sort of people can be found nearby.
Time eases along its nascent track. The ocean breathes and the constellations slip across the celestial ceiling. The stone sentinels are still.
Then a flashlight cuts through everything. No, three flashlights coming around a rocky point not far to your right, moving straight toward you, and all at once you know you are in Mexico, and that you have been visiting there for some indeterminate amount of time. Still nothing specific, still no name, neither of a town nor your own. Just Mexico.
As the lamps draw nearer your heart begins to trot. You might not know your name or your occupation or where you are or how you’ve gotten there, but you do know that the Mexican police coming upon you late at night when you’re all alone on the beach—to say nothing of being immersed in amnesia—is not fortuitous company to acquire. And while you suppose it could be anyone—preferably a sect of salacious sea nymphs—somewhere in your defunct memory are experiences warning that these high-powered beams do not tend to announce welcome intrusion.
Now the ocean is churning and hissing at a boil, the stars affray with popping flashbulbs, the sentinels swaying and staring.
You scour your brain for something useful—a name, where you are, what you are doing. The basics. Nothing comes.
Now the triad is near enough that you can hear their footsteps crunching in the sand. One by one the lights settle on you, on your face, in your eyes.
“Buenas noches.”
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