Alone with Everybody

Going back to the start I woke up from a coma on the second day of February 2004 with no memory, I was vacant. I would offer a better description but there quite simply isn’t one. Really, there is no way for me to describe how it felt to forget everything that I ever knew, including the people that I loved. It’s an emptiness that I know and am familiar with, yet I just can’t put into words that anybody who hasn’t experienced the same thing would understand. The injuries that I received were the result of a side-impact car crash on 26th of January 2004, in which I was a passenger. It was the day before my twenty-seventh birthday and I have no recollection of my birthday whatsoever, although, my parents brought a cake into the intensive care ward to celebrate it with me. They also brought along all of the usual birthday pleasantries, gifts and cards and the like, I just don’t remember any of it. You see, I have had and continue to have problems assimilating new memories. It’s not just limited to new memories, there is a good chunk of my long-term memory missing too. Fortunately, friends and family have told me many stories that have helped bring back some old memories. By all accounts I really lived my life to the full and I would dearly love to be able to remember some of those experiences with a little more clarity, maybe that would help to give me back a sense of history, something which, I feel that I am sadly lacking these days. Right now its 11.18 pm on the 17th of December 2004. I’ll write this story as I go, kind of like a diary. In this manner, I hope that you will be able to see the evolutions in my thought process as they happen. I‘ve come a long way in the last eleven months so who knows where I will be in eleven more? It is only now that I really feel capable of doing this, although, I’ve wanted to do it since I can remember, post accident. I’m hoping that by writing my story I’ll be able to start coming to terms with what happened and maybe then, I’ll be able to start building a new one. It seems easier for me to type everything into a computer than it is to have all this information jumbled up in my head all of the time. I’m never able to process an idea from start to finish because I’m unable to retain a single thought for more than a couple of seconds; my brain just seems to jump automatically to the next idea. Sometimes, when I’m typing and thinking about what to write, it feels as if there is too much information for my brain to physically process and everything just freezes for a split-second and goes blank like a computer does when it has too many applications running at the same time. I’m sure that writing my story is going to prove to be a difficult task but it‘s not only something that I want to do, I feel that I have to do it. My name is Gary Chevalier and I was lucky enough to be born and raised on the idyllic island of Jersey, a British tax-haven just off the north-west coast of France, on the 3rd of February 1977. The island is much like any city on the south-coast of England in the sense that it has most of the same attractions, beautiful beaches and scenery plus facilities for all manner of sports. The only difference is that everything is on a smaller scale. I was told that the medical term for my injury, which will live with me forever, in one way or another, is a diffuse axonal injury. In short, the nerve cells in my brain were starved of oxygen as a result of being knocked-out in the aforementioned crash. I’ve been led to believe that what happened is as described in the first chapter, although, I have no personal recollection of anything whatsoever that happened on the night of the incident.