Blank Slate

Photo by Charlie Harutaka on Unsplash

If you could start over with a blank slate, what would you do?

Dawn shudders at the essay prompt as it beams down from the blackboard. The other college students babble incessantly, spinning imagined lives into being; filling the air with chaos and drowning her in mindless speculation. She hurries from the room before the professor officially dismisses them, gulping for breath. Outside she can breathe again, but her only thought is a vision of herself, forcibly erasing the prompt from the blackboard. How can she write such an essay? Eight years ago I woke up to a wretched existence in a hospital bed as a blank slate.

Waking in a strange room with machines she didn’t have names for and questions she couldn’t answer was bewildering. Fate had left her unconscious, floating in a battered sailboat, with no clues to the mystery that was herself. No parents came forward with relieved tears to claim her. No worried friends appeared to connect her with her past. No memories resurfaced to solve the mystery of herself. There was only the nurses, the doctors, the social workers, to put herself back together again. Never once in eight years has anything seemed familiar.

Sometimes she thinks her favorite dream is a memory. If only it was! If only she had just one memory. But this one is just a dream. In the twilight, she walks down a worn path with her father to a small wooden sailboat. Look, she says to him, I can sail to the end of the river and back. She doesn’t know how old she is in the dream. Young though; maybe a teenager, eager to show off her skill. Her father is just as eager to be shown. His smile grows with every step. It almost could be a memory. The feel of her father’s hand in hers; the sparkle of stars in the water; the gentle caress of the night breeze. It all feels real. But it’s not. Because when they enter the sailboat, she holds up her hands and golden light spills out in intricate patterns and that is how she guides the boat through the water. They sail at impossible speeds, passing slower vessels, passing cities, all the way down to the mouth of the river. There they turn around, laughing with delight. In the east, the sun rises and the dream ends.
If she could will herself into the world of her dream, she would. In that world her slate is all filled up, except for a little bit at the end, still waiting to be written. But reality is all around her as she walks through the buildings of the community college where she’s trying to cobble together something that looks like a life. She takes a bus to her next class: sailing. Her breath catches at the river. It makes her heart ache even more for the dream of what never was. This sailboat is fiberglass and modern, not weathered wood. The ropes (lines, the instructor said) are awkward in her hands. But something about it feels right.

I named myself, Dawn, she writes, after a memory that never happened, in the hope that someday, my slate will be filled.

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In fantasy, there's often a character who has amnesia who's trying to figure out who they are. Sometimes they're even stuck on earth, even though they're from a magical world. I've always wondered how would this character handle being told magic isn't real? Assuming they can still talk, they know the meaning of words and would know the word magic meant, but since they can't remember anything, would they remember that magic is real, while seeing all evidence to the contrary? Obviously, this question will never be answered. But it did lead to some interesting backstory for Dawn, who will eventually have a grand adventure to get her memories back.