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I was twenty.

He was nineteen.

We broke up.

And that was it.

Dear God.

Please let me forget.

I remember a lot. In fact, I remember too much. For example, that sign. Stop. I remember that sign. I know for certain I've seen that sign before. However, as much as I remember beholding the sight of that sign, I can't recall where I've seen it before prior to seeing it now. I can't tell what I was doing when I first saw that sign.

I remember a lot of nothing.

For the most part, I used to struggle with keeping a good memory. Simple tasks would always slip by me due to my then hectic schedule. School. Work. Home. Relationships. It was all a lot to keep track of. Understandably, I forgot many different things, and was subsequently forgiven because what I forgot was never truly serious.

Right now, I know that this person I serious. I know – deep down – that it is imperative that I remember this person. But I do remember him. I do. I remember seeing him. I remember hearing him talk about his dreams to become Academy's new Headmaster. I remember him laughing. I remember his touch. I remember his taste. I even remember his scent.

I don't remember why I know this. I don't know why I know this. I don't know what it is that I'm remembering, as I stare at him through the café's window. All I'm sure of is that I remember this man. I don't know this man. In all, it would be best for me to walk away. But I walk towards the café. I enter the café. And I occupy the seat ahead of him.

"Hey Shawn." He speaks familiarly. "It's so nice to see you." He smiles. I remember that smile. "How have you been buddy?"

I stare confused at him. How does he know my name? Does he also remember me, but doesn't know me? "I'm sorry." I decide to go with a chance. "Do I know you?"

The bet was poor. His smile vanishes. "What? It's me." His eyes landscape my expression. "Hunter."

I can't fall asleep as easily as I could. Most times I believe that it's all due to my nature. I'm so carefree that sleep seems more like a chore than a pastime. I've convinced myself of that, but I know that it's not the truth. I know because I can remember a time when I could fall asleep with ease. I remember that feeling of peace, and security. I remember being in love and content, so much so that I could easily drift off and leave the world behind.

Most of these sleepless nights come about because I can't stop myself from trying to recall what feels like a past, but is as close as the present. Ever since I agreed to work at the Academy with the man called Hunter, that feeling of remembering and knowing have nailed my eyelids open. For some reason, whenever I'm around him I get the feeling that I should know why he can't look at me. That I should know why he desperately calls my name. That I should know about something I've forgotten.

But I don't know. I just don't.

"You enrolled them Shawn."

I felt hideously embarrassed. Nothing has ever been the same since the night I woke up beneath a car. Bright white light, for example, hurts my eyes. And I forget things – simple, inexcusable things – far more often than I remember ever doing.

With the feeling of embarrassment now choking me, I looked on feebly at Hunter. "O-Oh." I reply sheepishly. "I must have forgotten. I'm sorry."

Instantly, Hunter's face contorts to a look of abysmal anger. I immediately regret saying what had just fled my mouth. It had slipped me – much like everything seems to nowadays – that Hunter seemed to dislike hearing the words "I forgot" flying out of my mouth. Just hearing that sentence put him in a foul mood.

"Like you did us."

I could easily tell that he hated saying those words – for some reason I knew what he was like whenever he made a mistake, only to convince himself to let it slide – and just as easily, I could tell that the very sentence hurt. Much like a truth.

The realization that maybe this was the truth, that maybe there was some us at one point, hit me like a brick wall. Or a car traveling well over one hundred. I came to the understanding – the longer I stood in this silence – that there was something very important which I had forgotten. And this is when it chose to come back to my mind.

Twenty years ago, Hunter and I had broken up. I hadn't seen him once since then.

"Don't be." Hunter speaks long before I can even find the words to say. "It's my fault for jumping to conclusions." He smiles – falsely. I know this because we've been together. Damn it. Why am I just remembering now? Why not twenty years ago? Why not two months ago? Why not yesterday? "You just look a lot like someone I once knew. I'm sorry."

I felt a heavy lump form in my chest. Due to this being something of a period of enlightenment for me, my mind raced over to pieces of memory and hastily collages them to form a photograph. I was there. And wrapped around me – with his head peeking over my shoulder – was Hunter. The very same Hunter now staring at me. I dug deeper into my mind during our shared moment of silence, and found the fact that I had taken that photograph with me when I packed up my things and left the small apartment. I recall thinking, at the time, that I would give anything to forget. And I had. For all of twenty years.

The series of mad emotions – ranging from surprise, to nervousness, to a feeling of joy – boiled over in me, and nearly threw me into a lions' den of various sentences, only to be stopped short by the sound of a phone ringing. I looked to it the same time Hunter did and saw what he saw. Stephanie McMahon's name on the caller id. As strangely glad as I was for remembering what I thought was long forgotten, this was the one thing I wished I could forget. In an instant, I was reminded cruelly why I had decided to part ways with Hunter. Why I left him to return to an empty apartment. Why I vanished for twenty years.

I did it for her.

"Stephanie?" I speak distantly. Hunter doesn't look at me. He glances. I know for certain that this means what I will never allow myself to hear. You're in the way. "Answer it." Fall off my tongue like molten lead.

Without looking back, I leave Hunter's office. Three weeks was not enough time to make up for my twenty year absence. Despite even the accident, the gap between us was too much to ever hope to fill. In no time at all, Hunter had moved on.

The process of remembering all that had been forgotten is never easy. It becomes especially difficult when there is nearly twenty three years' worth of memory recollection to be done. In the past, I had prayed to be granted with the ability to forget, now I am spending most of my time trying to mull over what Hunter and I had. Then I spend the rest of my time piecing together the reasons as to why I had ended it all in the first place. One name came to mind. Stephanie McMahon.

It saddened me greatly to hear myself re-convince myself that letting Hunter go was the best decision. After all, I should have finished doing this all twenty years ago. However, like a lasting judgment, that little red sports car had gone and ensured that my mind stayed frozen in a time greatly distanced from the current. Now, as if Karma herself was holding the strings, I was forced to recall every detail in mere nights.

This became the reason why I declined Hunter's offer to live with him. Despite even finding out – from students nonetheless – that Hunter's marriage to Stephanie had long since dissolved (the two were just a cover couple with blank pages underneath), I found it difficult to even so much as think about being near him. Especially now. I had forgotten about us. I had forgotten about him. Nothing could make that even remotely less sinful than it already was. I had no excuse. An accident wasn't an excuse. I shouldn't have forgotten about him. I shouldn't have. Not when I had our photograph burnt deep into my mind. Not when I had once promised him a forever after.

Unforgivable. That is what this was. That is what I was. A criminal who hurt the man he loved once, only to return idiotically and without care twenty years later and hurt him all over again.

I decidedly lived on my own. And then found a friend in Mark – whom, for the sake of being bored – took up as my roommate. Mark allowed me to be Shawn Michaels twenty years before. He allowed me to be the Shawn Michaels I wished I had stayed as no matter what. But in the end, I came to realize how much he wasn't – and was never going to be – Hunter. Both because I could never see him as Hunter, and because Mark was never truly interested.

"Cake?" I stared at the desert, before dragging my eyes to Mark.

"Yeah." He replied tiredly. "A student baked it for me, but I'm not a fan of deserts. So here." He shoved it closer to me.

I smiled a bit. It made me glad to see good being done. Mark liked his student a lot. And like atonement towards my misleading attitude all this time, I made it my duty to bring them together. Looking at it now, my baking skills really do suck.

"I don't want it."

One month had gone by. Ever since I came to recall all that I selfishly forgotten, Hunter and I rarely saw each other. It wasn't intentional – at least not for me – but rather graduation was coming up and it was all hands on deck. However, in the blink of an eye, graduation came, and left. Students whose faces I had gotten quite used to seeing suddenly disappeared.

But not from memory.

Due to my own brain being limited since being struck by a car, I kept a scrapbook of all the students who came through my office door. A photograph of each and every one of them next to something they wrote, typed, or drew. Inside every one of my hand-made scrapbooks sat a future adult who I did not want to forget. Not like how I forgot Hunter.

Time moved by rather quickly and soon the entire turnover ceremony was over. It was time for a short break before everything was able to finally return to normal. It was during this rest period that Hunter chose to confront me in my now emptier apartment (Mark had moved out having lost his reason to stay). Our conversation started off as normally as it could. I kept up the act of not recalling a word of what he was saying, solely because hearing it escape his pained voice broke my heart. I had turned him into this. A man desperate for reconcile.

"Why did you leave?"

That was the question that broke down my defenses. In order to hide my expressions, I had steadfastly placed my back in his line of sight. It kept my emotions in check, but nothing prepared me for the wave of guilt that came crashing down the moment Hunter stopped trying to tell me that I remembered (I did, even though I denied), and rather let me remember all on my own. I knew why I had left. I knew. But how in the world could I ever tell him?

Realizing that an answer was needed – as well as deserved seeing that Hunter wasn't the one who had forgotten about us – I swallowed my fears of the possible outcomes, and gave Hunter the response he should have known the day I broke up with him. "I don't know what you're talking about Hunter" I did know exactly what he was talking about, "but if I did, then it was probably because I wanted you to have a normal life."

Yes. That was it. I remember clearly now. Hunter and I were lying on our bed. I was resting in the cup of his chest with his arm as my pillow. He was lying with his back on the bed staring off at the ceiling above. I had brought up the topic of dreams and goals. I wanted to become a world famous wrestler. He wanted to become something far more close to home. He wanted to become the Headmaster of our alma mater, The Academy. I remember looking at his face and seeing the beam of light and happiness that streamlined across it. I remember spotting room for no argument in his gleaming eyes. I remember thinking in that exact few seconds /No more./

/This has to end/

And then I ended it the following night. I left. I wrestled. I achieved my goal. Then I saw Hunter's face in the papers. He was married to Stephanie McMahon. He was the next in line to become the Headmaster of The Academy. In that moment I knew that we were truly over. I knew that, as I had said on our break-up night, there was nothing for me there. We could never return to what we once were. We had finally ended.

It didn't take long for me to disconnect myself from the world – so much so that I prayed for the power to forget it all. Like a divine intervention – or a rude awakening – on that very night, I stepped out into the road a second too early and got plowed by a speeding Chevrolet. When I came to, my mind was set to a time before Hunter's marriage, a time before even Hunter. When I woke up three weeks later, I was nothing more than a ghost living in an alien shell full of memories from a time too far off to be the past, but too distant to be the present.

"Normal?" I feel my heart jolt in surprise. I had not expected him to respond. Still, however, I kept my eyes on the glass doors separating the inside from the balcony on the outside. "If normal is worrying about you each and every day! If normal is wondering if you're alive or safe for twenty straight years! If normal is wishing – just fucking hoping – that I could even get a glimpse of you in a store front as I passed through a city! If normal is just being fucking content with passing by you in a crowd…if that's all normal, then fuck normal!" Once again, my heart tightened to a halt. Never had I wanted to disappear more than I had now. "And fuck you for making me live that way!"

I find myself thinking /Good/ to the idea that Hunter now hates me.

However, the moment I give leeway to the unorthodox piece of celebration, Hunter's arms come around me and cling on for dear life – as he screams "Why can't I hate you?" into my upper shoulder and clavicle. Through the pounding of my heart, I can feel him trying to suction the life out of me. I can feel his desire. I can feel his rage. I know what he wants. I know what he wishes.

I won't give in. Not now when all we have left are the shadows of a tainted past. Not now when all we have to go back to is twenty years' worth of nothing.

"You should leave Hunter." I speak in a voice not my own. "There's nothing for you here."

More so than even him, those words hurt me. Added to that is the crushing feeling of having him believe me and let go of my body. Once again, I had to fight with myself to keep my back turned to him. The sounds of his footsteps become more and more distanced. I flinch in pain to each one of them. /Don't look at him/ I repeat like a chant. I obey. Even when I heard the soul-crushing sound of the front door closing. I stood my ground. And only then did I allow myself to break down into tears.

"If it hurts so much," My heart completely stopped to the sound of his voice. All convincing thoughts fled my mind as I disobeyed my own self and turned to face him. He was there. Right there "then don't tell me to leave." He smiled softly. It melted my already fitful heart. "At the very least you should have picked a better line than the one you used twenty years ago."

In that one sentence, I knew he now knew. I knew he could see through the façade. Hunter knew now that I had remembered us, and our time together. He knew and I didn't even try to cover it up. Having used up all my energy to put the past to rest, I was left weak to his attacks. So weak in fact that all I wanted to do was not blink. Because if I did, maybe he would no longer be there.

I stood crying for the majority of the time we spent inside that silence.

"You said it once before Shawn." He shifts to a more casual stance. "The only thing standing in the way is me." I began sobbing louder at the very memory of having said such disastrous things. Twenty years, and he could recall it all with ease like it had happened just the day before. In all this, Hunter stood his ground with his back facing the closed door. "Now I'm saying it to you. The only person standing in the way of us is you."

My mind blanked the more I tried to overcome the hill of emotions that had attacked me the second I realized that Hunter really was still here. That this time, I didn't turn around to see him obediently gone. Whilst in a netherworld, my mind went back to the only time it could conjure up. A time exactly twenty three years ago. A time when I first meant Hunter Helmsley – the teenager with big dreams, turned into the man with a heart capable of forgiving a lover who had forgotten him all of twenty years.

"What are you going to do about that Shawn?"

There were many, many things I knew I could have done and said in this scenario, but what I did instead turned out to be the best decision of my life. Moved solely on instinct, I ran over to Hunter and grabbed him up in a clumsy embrace. My tear-stricken face automatically buried itself – much like it did in the old days – deep into his chest. The familiarity of it all – his muscles, his scent, his voice, his heartbeat – brought me to a new set of tears.

Dear God.

Please let me never forget this. Ever.