The Woods Outside Hell

They call it a dissociative fugue state. I didn't know it at the time of course. I only knew that I woke with a start, as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water on me and I had no idea where I was.

It was dark and I was outside, laying on concrete between what I determined were two dumpsters. Light from the street at the end of the alley filled in some of the shadows. I stood up slowly checking instinctively to determine where, if anywhere, my body ached as though finding a wound or bruising of some kind might help me understand. But there was nothing.

Not even a wallet. Panic struck me for a moment. No wallet, no identification, no money. I searched all my pockets frantically. Not even a scrap of paper.

I wrestled between the fear of having no money and the slow recognition that the more aware I became of myself in this darkened alleyway between two dumpsters, the more I realised I was aware of myself the way someone is aware of the presence of another person in the room without knowing who they were. I did not know who I was.

This was no metaphorical puzzle. I did not know who I was. I knew that I was, that I existed, here, in this alleyway, at night, poorly lit in an undetermined urban area whose sounds were growing with my awareness of them like stuccato bursts of machine gun fire in the distance.

But that was all I knew.

I didn't know how I'd gotten here or worse still, who I was to have gotten here. The world was not entirely unfamiliar but nor was it recognised. I might have thought I was somewhere I had once visited as a tourist or somewhere I had passed through once, ethereally. But I didn't know who that I was. I only knew fragments and those fragments consisted only of that which was around me at that very moment. The past was a void.

Having completed the tour of my body finding no wounds, holes or other troubling physical debilities which might have complicated my immediate existence I stared down the alleyway trying to measure in some way the chances of escaping without being sighted.

But why escape when I still hadn't figured out the basics of my existence like name, purpose and account balances? For example, I knew a wallet might well house the answers to all of these questions but I did not know how I knew a wallet would. I just did. And I had none. I knew to check my back pocket, the pocket inside the wool-blend herringbone coat I wore over me.

Escape because in truth, the air was chilly and whilst I was not wet as one would be having had a bucket of ice water thrown upon them, I was growing gradually more aware of the chill and perhaps the idea that shelter or some kind would be preferable. I looked up at the sky for clues but could find none between the darkness of the hour and the clouds which obscured the luminscence of the moon.

Semantic knowledge is preserved.