You once told me you knew me. And I believe that I knew you too.

But now, everything is different.

It may hurt, but I've had time, I've grown used to it.

Numbed.

All of those memories. Bad, good, scattered to the wind.

Some may one day be rescued; others blow out of our reach.

I continue to hope.

It's irrational, this feeling of absolute desolation. No amount of squint speak can explain it. It's rush of hormones, a part of the temporal lobe which tells my body that I feel sad.

But it's so much more. That, I cannot figure out.

You're still him, the same man, the same 106 bones, combination of elements and complex genetic information which makes the human body so extraordinary. But it's not you. You're not you, which in itself is an oxymoron.

This unfamiliar pain, it's there, your hypothesis is proven. The brain understands our situation, the risks, but the pain still resides in my heart. Metaphorically speaking.

You were one in ten thousand to react to the anaesthesia, but you were the only one in the thousands of people I've met to react with me.

I cling to hope like a wounded soldier on a crumbling rock face.

One of these days, I will fall.

That is a fact anyway, death is an immovable boundary eventually approached by all things.

Inevitable.

Either the rock beneath my fingers will crumble to dust and particulates causing me to tumble into the dark crevasse below or my body will become weak enough to disable my survival instinct.

One of these days I will die.

But not today.

Today, I have enough hope and strength for the both of us.

I will keep fighting, despite an inability to maintain my faith in the human race, which you always seemed to preserve despite your evident emotional connection to what we see every day.

And, even if you never remember, I will.

And I'll love you forever, despite forever being indefinable, despite love being an illogical concept.

I'll never forget.

I accept you may never remember, but I'll never forget. And in the meantime, I'll find justice in others lives, even if none can be found in my own.