Unidentified

She lost a year, but her photos didn't.

The cloud storage warning had been sitting in my notifications for over three weeks before I finally got around to clearing up space. It was the font color that turned out to be the tipping point for me, going from an orange “94% full’ to a much more alarming bright red when it hit “95% full.” So on a Tuesday night, alone with a glass of wine I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, I started deleting.

Screenshots were the first to go, then recipes I’d never cooked, memes I’d never sent, then a boarding pass from a flight to Sacramento last December that I don’t remember taking. Easy enough so far. But as I kept going back a couple months further, it was around October of the year after my stroke that a man’s face started showing up.

He was tall, sandy-haired, and handsome in a kind of unremarkable way that should have made him easy to place. In the first photo he was laughing at something off camera with a coffee cup in one hand. I recognized neither the cup nor the laughing face, but I did recognize my own kitchen counter in the background.

I told myself to stay calm as I scrolled, but I couldn’t.

By the fortieth photo I began to recognize the panic rising in my throat. It was familiar because I’d felt it before in the hospital, when I genuinely wasn’t able to tell a nurse what year it was. This panic felt similar. It wasn’t so much the frustration of forgetting that bothered me as much as the germinating futility that I felt creeping in. This same feeling has been an unwelcome intruder in my routine the past couple years, off and on ever since the stroke.

By the time I made it all the way back to the first appearance, the tally came to two hundred and six photos of him over the course of fourteen months. These included beach photos, hiking photos, happy-hour photos, a photo from a birthday party with a cake that said something I couldn’t read in the blur, a photo of him asleep on my couch with my cat curled up on his chest like he belonged there. Mind you, this is the same cat who hisses at strangers and who took eight months to let my own sister touch her.

It was almost eleven at night, but I texted my sister a photo of him anyway.

“Do you know this guy? He shows up in my photos a lot, from like a year and a half ago onward?”

I saw three dots appear on the screen almost immediately to indicate that she was writing her response.

“Haha, no idea. If you started seeing someone after Tom moved out way back when, then that’s news to me. He’s kind of cute though! New guy in your life?”

My heart began to race as I typed out my own response.

“I’ve been clearing out my old photos tonight and whoever this guy is, he’s been showing up in them for over a year.”

The three dots appeared again, but this time there was a gap of almost twenty seconds before I received the next message.

“Katie, did you take your meds today?”

It was a valid question, but it turns out I had indeed taken my meds. I checked the bottle and even counted out how much was left to do the math against the date. I was on schedule, everything was good. Also there wasn’t anything else I felt confused about – I knew what year it was, what day it was, that my dog needed to be washed soon and that the dishwasher just started making that noise again.

It was just this man…I just didn’t know this man. I didn’t know this man, who I had spent time with off and on for over a year, and who my cat apparently trusted enough to sleep with him on my couch. And yet someone I wasn’t close enough with to let sleep in my bed? How does that dynamic work? What was this exactly? My panic rose a notch higher as I responded to my sister.

“I did. And I’m fine, just going through old photos and having trouble placing people. I’m fine, I promise.”

She offered to come over, but I told her not to. I then immediately regretted telling her no, but couldn’t bring myself to text her back to admit that I was actually beginning to feel scared.

I went through the photos again, but slower this time, looking for any clues that might crack the case open, like a street sign or a restaurant receipt left on a table, but nothing jumped out. The geotags were a bit more helpful, though almost all of them were stamped with my own address. I did notice that in March a cluster of tags shifted to a cabin somewhere upstate. I couldn’t help but plug the coordinates into a map and stare at them like I would a Magic Eye image, hoping if I saw them in just the right way, they might rearrange themselves into something familiar. We’d gone and stayed somewhere together, evidently. There was a photo of him cooking eggs in a kitchen I didn’t recognize, wearing a flannel shirt I’ve never seen. His face was turned just enough toward the camera that I could tell whoever was holding the phone (presumably me?) had said or asked something that he was about to answer.

I will never know what he said. Or what I asked for that matter.

That’s the part that kept me up that night, sitting in my kitchen while hyper-focused on my laptop. The fear wasn’t that I’d lost a relationship (if that’s even what this was) but that somewhere over the course of these last couple years there had been entire conversations (hundreds of them probably) that I will never be able to get back. Nor can I reclaim all of the jokes, arguments, flirting, and all the other background domestic noise that fills the space between two people. I wouldn’t be surprised if I knew this stranger’s coffee order once. But apparently none of it had made the trip across whatever bridge in my brain had collapsed two years ago. I suppose it shouldn’t have been too surprising since I had been warned about gaps like this. I remember the neurologist had used the word “patchy,” but somehow I never equated that with the word “erased.”

I would have searched my emails for his name, but I didn’t have a name to search for. At a frustrated dead-end, I helplessly typed in the words “sandy hair” in the photo search bar, which returned forty more images that I hadn’t seen before.

Around two in the morning I found one last photo of him. My address again, him in a coat by my front door, looking back at the camera with an expression I couldn’t read. Not anger or sadness, but rather something more like patience. He looked…expectant, as if he was waiting for me to say something. Why on earth would I have taken a photo of that?

After that, there was nothing. Apparently that was his goodbye photo. I didn’t have any evidence of any emails or text conversations from that time period that I could scroll through. Maybe I had intentionally deleted all of those, but couldn’t bring myself to delete the photos?

I found myself clenching my eyes shut in frustration, doing my best to summon any kind of organic memory of the man, yet knowing the whole time that it was futile. All I had now was just an absence picking up exactly where the presence had left off. And it bothered me more than I care to admit.

I didn’t delete any of the photos. My self-rationalization was that I might need them some day as evidence for…something. It was bullshit though, of course. The real reason I couldn’t delete those photos was that deleting them felt like erasing him twice, and somehow that didn’t feel fair to either him or to myself.

I closed the app and sat in my dark kitchen, the counter behind me the same as the one in the photo with him. I felt a cold tingle run up the back of my neck knowing that somebody had stood exactly where I was sitting now and had been, for over a year, someone I apparently cared about enough to let him sleep on my couch with my cat curled against his chest.

I know how insane all of this sounds, but even today I still don’t know who he is.

I think about that more than I’d like to admit.