The Confession – Chapter 1 – Memories

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David woke up to the sound of the continuous faint beeps of some machine kept somewhere close to his ears. When he slowly opened his eyes, he didn’t quite recognize his surroundings and it took him more than a few moments to realize that he was in a hospital. The beeps were coming from a machine which was supposedly monitoring his pulse and heartbeat evidenced by the sensors connected to the machine from his chest and the small clip-like device on his left index finger. Feeling his face, he noticed that he had a couple of bandages on his left forearm and his head was also bandaged with an injury on the left side of his forehead.

Once he got over his initial grogginess, he looked around and noticed the other guy in the room. He had propped up a second chair to put his legs up and was dozing away. When David cleared his throat, the other guy opened his eyes and looked at him. On seeing David awake, the guy broke into a big smile.

“Hey dude, welcome back!” he said, getting out of the chair and coming up to David’s bed. “You had us worried for quite a while bro.”

David didn’t quite know how to react. For whatever reason, he simply couldn’t recognize the other person at all. Although he felt some degree of familiarity with him, David couldn’t quite place the other person or figure out why exactly he felt so familiar.

When David didn’t register any emotion or say anything, the other guy asked him “Hey David, dude, are you ok man? How do you feel now?” and when he didn’t get any answer, the other guy pressed the switch to call the duty nurse into the room. And when the nurse came in, the other guy went up to her and asked her to inform the doctor that David had regained his consciousness.

After five odd minutes, the doctor walked into the room, all the while smiling at David. “So David, you had us all worried for quite a while now. How do you feel now? Does your head still hurt?” he asked. David mumbled “I feel fine, kind of…”

“Where am I? What happened to me?” he asked.

“You were involved in an accident around 36 hrs ago. You were brought in by the policemen, who managed to call your friend Ram here based on the last dialed number from your mobile” the doctor replied.

David looked a little perplexed “Accident! But I don’t remember any of this.”

“That’s ok, you just need to relax, take some rest. Just lie down and try to get some sleep” the doctor put his hand on David’s shoulder and told him.

He then took Ram outside the room. “It looks like your friend might have had more serious internal injuries than we initially suspected. Let us run a series of tests to verify the same, but my initial suspicion is that he has experienced some form of memory loss.”

“That is why he reacted the way he did. It was almost like he didn’t recognize me!” Ram exclaimed. Given that David had been his room-mate for almost three years now and they were quite close friends, Ram had been disturbed by his reactions over the last ten odd minutes since he had regained consciousness.

“Don’t worry Ram, these kinds of things are quite common in accidents involving head injuries. Let’s not jump to any conclusions yet. Let’s run the tests first and then we will be in a better position to figure out what is happening to David. Ok.”

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This post has been written for the Write Tribe Festival of Words 2 where today’s prompt had to be about memories.

This is the first post in a novella “The Confession” that I am writing trying to correlate the same to the Write Tribe Festival of Words 2.