Lost and Found– Chapter 2
Hospital
When I woke up again, I was already in the hospital. A private room, and of course, there was only one bed.
To my surprise, the person keeping watch over me was the woman I saw before I fainted. She was sitting with her back to me at the desk in the room, in the same outfit as when I saw her. She was staring intently at her laptop, occasionally glancing at the few documents beside it, and from time to time, jotting something down on them with a pen.
I lay there looking at her back. I thought long and hard and was sure that I didn’t know her. The woman wasn’t particularly striking and was on the slim side, but she had a unique aura. There was a strong sense of confidence about her, yet not in a way that felt domineering. At first glance, she seemed approachable, but when you tried to get closer, there was a sense of distance. It was a feeling that was hard to describe but one that was unforgettable.
Perhaps I made a sound when I sat up because she turned to me. When she saw that I was awake, she put aside her work and walked over to me.
“You’re up. Are you feeling alright?” She asked with concern.
I felt mentally fine, so I shook my head and asked her, “How long have I been out?”
“The whole morning. It’s already past lunchtime now. Do you want something to eat?”
Having skipped two meals, I was starving, but there was a question more pressing than food, “Who are you? And why are you taking care of me?”
She opened her mouth in disbelief. She took a deep breath and asked instead, “So, you weren’t joking this morning? You honestly don’t know why we’re calling you DM Qiu?”
I nodded.
“You still know who you are, right?”
“Qiu Ruwei, 22 years old, new employee in the HR department of Saiye Technologies?” But her reaction unsettled me. I started to doubt the answer that I was so sure of.
Upon hearing my answer, she immediately turned around, left the room, and called for the doctor.
What followed was three days of extensive physical and psychological tests, with a special attention to my brain. During those three days in the hospital, no one else came to visit me. She was my only visitor, and I gradually came out of shock and began to come to terms with the doctor’s diagnosis and her explanation.
To put it simply, I had a condition that seemed to only exist in novels and movies, the legendary amnesia. I had lost all memories of the past seven years. The doctor said there was no physical trauma to my brain, and based on a series of psychological assessments, his preliminary diagnosis was dissociative amnesia, a type of psychogenic amnesia caused by psychological factors.
Was it the dissociative amnesia that caused me to forget the past seven years, or was it because I lost seven years of my memories that they diagnosed me with this peculiar condition? The chicken-or-egg paradox wasn’t something I had the strength for at the moment. What shook me the most was how everything had changed overnight.
Xie Zhanghua—that was the woman’s name. She showed me all kinds of my identification documents, pointed to the calendar on the hospital wall—not something that could have been forged just for me—she even asked me to ask passersby what day it was, and finally she had me watch the news on the television. There was a report in the news on the upcoming 2013 Punch Music Festival, the largest music event in Yun. There was no denying it anymore.
Staring at myself in the mirror, noticeably older than I remembered, I smiled wryly. I never thought I would wake up in 2013 after a sleep. Is this how it feels like to wake up and realize it was all a dream?
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