I don’t know when I stopped running. But I know why. Eventually, I fell onto a bench in a small park, one more paved than natural. As cars passed me on all sides, I struggled to find my breath. My chest heaved and I coughed. My head wouldn’t stop bleeding. I needed to clean it up. I could feel people watching me. It felt like a net surrounded me and someone in the shadows was pulling it tighter and tighter.
I lifted the case and placed it on my lap. I held it there for a moment.
Michael Swann.
There was still nothing. I remembered nothing. It wasn’t like I didn’t believe this was my name. I just felt like maybe it was my name from a prior life. Maybe I died in the explosion, for I’d heard people on the street talking about what happened. Maybe I was reincarnated. I knew that made no sense at all.
As I’d run through the city, things at once became more and less clear. I knew where I was going. I can’t explain that, either. None of the sights around me looked particularly familiar. Yet I seemed to know where I was nonetheless. As I sat on the bench, this new realization was at odds with how my self remained such an utter blank.
Eventually, when the two people on the bench across from me finally walked away, I opened the case. I dug through the contents. The more I shuffled things around, the more frantic I felt. I couldn’t find the sticker. I must have left it behind. It might be hard to understand how this made me feel. That sticker was my lifeline. It connected me to my life. It was the only thing. And it was gone.
Without the sticker, I was no one. That realization felt like a current carrying me further and further away. For the first time, I felt exhausted, spent. I lost all will to move, even to breathe. For just a second, I wanted more than anything to blink out, cease to exist.
And that is when my finger brushed against something small, smooth, and cool. I grabbed it, lifting it out from under a stack of papers, and my eyes widened. I held a money clip in my hand. It was my money clip. My money, my credit card, and . . . my driver’s license. I pulled that out and held it in my hand. A surge of energy filled me. I vibrated as I read the words on that tiny piece of plastic.
Name: Michael Swann
Height: 6 feet 1 inch
Weight: 200 pounds
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blond
Address: 443 Glen Meadow Drive, West Chester, PA 19380
Then I looked at the picture. A stranger’s eyes seemed to peer back at me. My head tilted. Who’s that? I thought. He was an utter stranger. Or I was.
Dropping the license, I tore through the rest of the contents of the case. The words I read registered like familiar roots in a foreign language. Singularly I understood, but taken as full sentences, as ideas, those same words merged into a senseless jumble of nonsense.
Eventually, I stopped on a crisp sheet of paper. My name, Michael Swann, blazed across the top in large, blunt print. My eyes ran over words like Education and Employment. I saw Office of the Governor and Axis Sales. Although I had no idea it was a résumé I read, my résumé, I had the sense that these words, taken together, told my story.
My eyes closed and my head throbbed. I felt like I might pass out. Seeing that picture, those words, it all tore away the last shred of hope I had. My being, my self, had been ripped away. I’d lost everything. Yet somehow, through the crushing weight of that moment, a much smaller sensation rose up. I felt the slight press of the case on my lap. My lap. My case. The license had come from my case. It was mine.
I find revisiting that particular moment to be the most painful. It wasn’t like I suddenly wanted to live again. It was somehow more, and less, than that. In some Cartesian way, it was like I burst out of the darkness, into the searing and brutal light. I was reborn. An instant before, I had been nothing. And then I was Michael Swann.