So, my little poll on twitter about the POV of the story leans towards option 1, that you do want to see Elliot's POV here, although a lot of you are happy to leave the decision up to me. Thank you for your faith in me! (blush) I hope you will all agree with what I did here. In stead of letting Elliot tell his side of the story in bits and pieces, I'm giving you most of it in this chapter from his POV, right up to the moment they met in chapter 2. After this interlude, the story will continue where chapter 40 left off, and I will be able to switch POV's between our two favorite people if needed. Whatever I miss or choose to skip in this chapter, will be addressed later on.

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41. White Screen

If Elliot had to describe the feeling of waking up with no memories whatsoever about anything, it would be like what they sometimes do in cartoons on TV. The main character would be standing in the middle of the screen, that was completely white. No way to tell what was up or down, no depth, nothing at all to go on to find your bearings, and no sound aside from the echoes of your own voice.

It hadn't been that way the instant he woke up though. He'd felt like he was drowning in blackness and he had a very, very powerful drive to get to the surface because he needed to go somewhere. He needed to find ... something. It had enraged him that he couldn't remember where he needed to go. People around him had tried to calm him down and in the end, they had restrained him and injected him with something.

That's when the emptiness had come. The white screen and the deafening silence. He didn't know who he was and most importantly, he didn't know where he was going. Only that he had been going somewhere and it was important.

He had learned to put all of this into words with the help of a therapist, specialized in helping people with amnesia find their way in life again. They couldn't tell him if his memory would ever return, partially or in whole. As time went on, the people around him had tried to fill up the empty white screen, but all the things they told him were like drawings to him. Very colorful sometimes, very abstract other times, but they were all drawings. Inanimate. They didn't mean anything to him. They filled the screen but it wasn't his life. At least he didn't recognize it as his life.

Once he was released from the hospital, Kathy had brought him to a house and a young child. Kathy was his wife, she'd told him, and the child was his youngest son, Eli. He was going to be four years old soon. Eli was a wonderful, lively child, who managed to distract him from his worries and from the emptiness he felt inside. Eli called him daddy and he did so without any hesitation. Unlike the older children.

He had five children! Like his wife, the older children approached him with caution. Disappointment even. Especially Richard. Richard was taking his memory loss very hard and Elliot wished he could do something for this young man. He was eighteen and had just decided to join the Marines, so he would be leaving home very soon. Richard kept his distance until then and Elliot had accepted it. There was nothing he could do about it.

Maureen was his oldest. She had already moved out of the house and was in a serious relationship. She kept her distance as well mostly, trying to live her own life, except when she and her then fiancé started looking for a place to live in Los Angeles in 2013. She'd asked him, her father, to come with them to look at apartments because they were planning to buy something, and he'd been very happy to come along and help them make a choice.

Elizabeth, Liz, was somewhat of a mystery to him. She had still lived at home at first, and had taken care of Eli a lot. She seemed to be observing him but didn't say much unless he asked her direct questions. They had fun together when they played with Eli and he'd tried to talk to his daughter when they were out in the park or the playground with her baby brother, but she never really opened up to him. He had a feeling there was something she was keeping from everyone around her, like a secret, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

And then there was Kathleen. She had accepted his memory loss more easily than anyone else he'd met so far. He liked Kathleen a lot. He couldn't say he recognized her, but there was something about her that did click with him. If they had met in Kindergarten, they would have been mortal enemies, competitors. But if they had met in high school, he was certain they would have become best friends. He liked her boyfriend, too. Terrence came from a poor background but he'd managed to make a life for himself. And he was good to Kathleen. He expected him to make him a proud grandfather even before Maureen and her husband.

Kathleen looked like her grandmother. His mother. Bernadette was full of life and unexpectedness. Elliot actually liked how unpredictable she was, and enjoyed being with her at her beach house. She treated him normally, as far as he knew, like a mother with a deep, unconditional love for her son. They laughed together and they were quiet together, and Elliot found out that a long walk on the beach was the best medicine to clear his mind whenever he felt like all the drawings on the white screen were becoming too blurry or confusing.

Because as lovely as all of his family members were, they were drawings on the white screen. Even his wife. He'd taken her and everyone else's word for it that she was his wife and her children were his children. But when he looked at the blonde, he kept wondering why he didn't feel anything. She wasn't bad looking but he simply didn't feel a connection at all. He had tried living with her and Eli and Liz, but there just seemed to be something missing.

He dreamed the same dreams over and over again during those first months after the mugging. In one dream, he was running, yelling at people to get out of the way, pushing them aside even. But he didn't know where he was going. He was looking for something and it was very important that he find it. It was frustrating to no end, not to know what his purpose was in that dream, and when he'd wake up in a cold sweat and found Kathy next to him, he always felt disappointed. She was kind to him, supportive and comforting, but he knew that there was something missing.

In another dream, he felt like there was someone running beside him or behind him, and sometimes in front of him. They were running together and it felt good. Right. But he couldn't see who it was. Each time he'd try to look at them, they disappeared from his line of sight. When they were in front of him, they were just a shadow and he couldn't catch up. The need to know who was running with him, became greater each time he dreamed that dream. And after a while he realized, he wasn't looking for something, but he was looking for someone, in his dreams as well as in his life. He was looking for the person who was running with him. And each time he woke up and looked into Kathy's concerned eyes, he knew it wasn't her. There had to be someone out there who could tell him who he truly was. Because he knew one thing after a while. He was not the husband Kathy needed.

They began arguing and Kathy sometimes threw accusations at him that gave him a better idea of the true state of his marriage before his memory loss. And of his character. He soon found out he could dish it out just as easily as she was throwing things at him. She called him self-centered, closed-off, not committed to making things work, uninterested in her. She wasn't far off the mark, but he wasn't going to admit that too easily. He'd been interested in her in a way, because he'd observed her. Watched her with the children and watched her move around the house. Watched her not go out with friends and solely focus on her little family. She'd fawned over him in the beginning, and it had felt fake to him, as if she was putting on a act. As time went by, the act slowly disappeared and the real Kathy came out. The bitter, disappointed Kathy who had hoped they'd have a fresh start after his memory loss. Only it wasn't working.

In turn, he told her she was trying to run his life, didn't understand him and wouldn't tell him what he truly needed to know. He didn't know if she knew what he was looking for, but he had a feeling that she wasn't being entirely truthful with him. She would dismiss his questions as nonsense and he would walk out of the house to get some air or visit his mother. The gap between them had only widened over time.

They had told him he was a retired cop. When he asked them why he had retired at age 44, all they would tell him was that there had been a shooting, a young girl had died and that he'd simply had enough. Kathy had suggested more than once that he'd be better off not remembering his time at the NYPD, up to the point that he understood that his job had come between them a lot. He hadn't been home enough and they had drifted apart. He was home 24/7 now, but the distance between them only seemed to grow.

He'd browsed around the internet a few times, looking up information about himself, the units where he'd worked and general NYPD proceedings. He'd read the words, including his own name, and they would be nothing but more drawings on the white screen. They meant nothing to him. His resumé showed that he'd spent the most time at the Special Victims Unit, and once he'd read up on what that unit entailed, he could understand why he'd just had enough one day. He hadn't bothered to find any more information on line again. He didn't need more drawings. He needed the real, tangible life that he was supposed to live.

And so he'd ventured outside to observe life. He moved out of the family home and into a small two-bedroom in Manhattan. It had to be a two-bedroom apartment, so he could have Eli over. Somehow, he knew Manhattan was the place to be. He still had all his basic skills like reading, writing, his sense of history and geography and even his sense of religion, although that wasn't so cut and dry anymore. He'd been a devout Catholic, according to Kathy and his priest, but he wasn't sure what he was now. He believed in God, and at times that was the only thing that kept him sane anymore. God would know who he was looking for. He just needed to trust Him to bring that person back in his life.

And He had.

He believed with all his heart that the accident had not been a coincidence. Over the years, he'd become used to simply accepting what was thrown at him. Despite still searching for that one person, he'd become a calm person and he'd like to think he'd accumulated some wisdom along the way. So waking up in the hospital with a broken body hadn't upset him too much. It was when he saw her, that all his senses had awoken. He knew her. Out of a million people that must have passed him by over the past four years, he'd never had this feeling with anyone before. It had shaken him to the core. He knew this woman and he needed to know more about her.

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So now we know how Elliot experienced his amnesia up to the point where he saw Olivia for the first time. In the next chapter, we pick up where chapter 40 left off. Please let me know if this chapter made sense to you at all!