“Beth Alder was real,” he said. “Your memories of her are real. They are from the time she was there. Your brain has been placing them in recent time because it needed recent material to build the day you believed you were living.”
“How long has this been happening?” I asked.
A pause. “That’s what we need to find out together,” he said. “But Sol — you came to the sleep study. You sought help. That matters. Some part of you knew something was wrong.”
I am still in the process of understanding what is real and what has been constructed. Dr. Obi uses the phrase calibrating the present, which sounds clinical and is, in practice, the daily work of checking my experience against external records and trusted people and learning to notice the difference between a memory that is recent and one that only feels recent.
It is painstaking work. Some days it is frightening. Most days it is simply careful, methodical, one thing at a time.
The sleep study that started all of this found no sleep in fourteen days. What it found instead was the trace of a mind that had been working very hard, for a very long time, to keep things running. Pacing at three a.m. Running the film of a constructed day. Maintaining the version of a life that felt intact so that the person inside it could keep going.
There is something in that which I am not sure how to hold. The part of me that built those days did it to protect the part of me that needed to function. It did what it could with what it had.
It was not malicious. It was not failure.
It was a mind doing the only thing it knew how to do.
I am learning to let it rest now.
I am learning to sleep.
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