Amnг©sico -

In his pocket, Elias found three items that served as his only anchors to reality:

On the fourth day, Elias found the blue door from the photograph. He stood before it, the silver key heavy in his hand. His heart hammered against his ribs—a physical manifestation of a memory trying to break through the fog.

A picture of a woman standing in front of a blue door, smiling at someone behind the camera.

It began three days ago. He had woken up in a hospital bed with no physical injuries, yet his mind was a "tabula rasa." The doctors called it , a condition where the brain blocks out personal information, usually due to stress or trauma. According to Merriam-Webster , his situation was the definition of a "long story" : a description of how something happened that is complicated to explain.

He followed the breadcrumbs. The ticket led him to a small coastal town three hundred miles north. Every face he passed was a potential ghost from his past. He felt like a character in a , a long written narrative of fictional events, except his life was the fiction he was trying to make real.

It didn't fit any lock in his immediate vicinity.

The man who called himself Elias sat on a park bench in a city whose name he didn’t recognize, holding a ticket to a destination he didn't remember choosing. This is the story of an —a person whose past is a blank canvas and whose present is a series of riddles. The Awakening