It's a peculiar thing when your memories leave you.
It's like they're still there, but covered up; like someone has packed them away in the corner of a faraway room and thrown over them the heaviest, dustiest blanket they could find.
A confused tourist, I know where I'm going, but not how to get there; I know where my memories are, but not how to get to them.
I long to remember the way your face would tilt slightly towards the sun as it streamed in through the windows of the first home we owned together, or how your tender lips and their ensuing kiss could lead me away from the darkened corner of my mind that housed my doubts, my fears, my heartaches, my despairs.
Instead, you would lead me away from the tears I had shed, towards the warming light that would be my salvation; back towards the late summer days that rolled slowly on, like the steady old steam train that gets there in the end.
Those days we thought, we hoped, would never end, so that we could bask in the presence of each other and embrace the knowledge that we made each other better.
You were my perfect complement. But that world is gone to me now. I have become the sarcastic comment that hurts.
It is not that you don't believe me, but rather that you want so much for what was, to be, that you have convinced yourself that we live in a fairytale; one where I am the distressed princess, living in solitude with a mass of tangled hair, and you are the prince who would save me.
From your place at the bottom of my tower, kind words drift upward, but they soon turn to angry shouts, and then the pleas of a broken man, a man whose only way up is for me to let down my hair.
But you don't understand that I can't, that it is too tangled around the pillars that hold up my whole world, that should I pull the wrong way it will come crashing down upon me.
Hair tangles my face so I cannot breathe, or see the light. All I can do is scream, and you scream back.
But it's OK because then I know you are still there, still waiting; still waiting to be the light at the end of the tunnel, a tunnel that continues on with so many twists and turns that I become disoriented, hoping each corner will be the last, only to be faced with darkness.
But when I arrive at that fork in the road, what path will I take?
How am I to know that I was happy before in the life I imagined we had; am I to take the word of a man whom I ''love'' but do not know?
What if the life I imagined was simply that - my imagination?
And fear is paramount; fear that what we did share was something worth fighting for, but that I have lost the battle.
I regret, but I accept, that I will never know what was, or what would have been, but I have hope for what still could be; hope that I can one day fill this empty space inside me with new memories.
Hope that instead of spending an undefined amount of time searching for a missing puzzle piece, we can start a new puzzle, together.
And hope, that even though I can't say I remember, you can still say you love me.
• By Anna Wise, Year 13, Roxburgh Area School
