The injury to his head took pieces of him. His memory. His balance. His ability to hold a thought, to keep a job, to trust his own mind from one hour to the next.
“I would forget where I was,” he said. “I would forget your names, for minutes at a time, and then it would come back, and the forgetting was so frightening that I started to believe you’d both be safer away from me.”
He had tried to stay. For a while, he had tried.
But a man who wanders off and cannot find his way home, who flies into confusion he cannot control, is not a safe thing to build a childhood around.
“One night I left,” he said. “I thought I was protecting you. I thought the kindest thing I could do was disappear.”
He told me about the last clear memory he had from before the fog took him for good. Me, at five, falling asleep on his chest while he read me the same book for the hundredth time.
