THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS TO TELL YOU, ORY! I’M DESPERATE to record them all before I start to forget. I want to tell you all about the others I’m with now, who they are, what they do, where we’re going.
I don’t say this to hurt you, I hope you wouldn’t take it that way—but until I met them, until Ursula let me join their caravan, I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been. I was too busy trying to find a hidden place to sleep each night, trying to stay off the main roads and away from buildings that looked like they might be inhabited. Trying not to die. But I was so lonely. And this part especially I’d never tell you, because it would be too cruel, but I can say it now: I was lonely out here, in this fucked-up new Virginian wilderness, but I was also lonely in our shelter, with you. I don’t mean always. I just mean that last week.
It’s not your fault. You tried as hard as you could. But you still had your shadow and all of your memories. You always knew who you were. But no matter how hard I try, I’ll slowly start to forget myself. I know, I know—you insist that in theory, the Forgetting can be resisted. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t know, Ory. You don’t know. I didn’t know either, until it finally happened to me. How hard it is to resist. How much the mind wants to fill in holes instead of just leaving them there—even when you know that every time you do it, it’ll be wrong, and you’ll give up something else that will just make another, bigger hole.
But here, with people like me, I feel light again. They understand. I’m not sure, but I think that being with them is helping me to not forget things—because we all want to remember. I wish you could meet them.
When they started traveling, four of them still had shadows. Now none of them do. It’s terrible luck, but I know enough now to know it’s not worth trying to figure out why. The last one to lose her shadow, our leader, is Ursula. I think you would like her, Ory. I’d guess she’s in her late forties or early fifties, with dark silvered hair she keeps buzzed as short as a man’s underneath the baseball cap she often wears. And her gun. She’s never without it. I think it might be the only one we have, among all nine of us. I’ve been with them two or three days now, and I haven’t yet heard Ursula laugh once, or seen her relax for even a moment. It’s like she’s made out of iron. The only time I’ve ever seen her smile is when I read the words on the side of their RV. Our RV. I’m one of them now.
Then there’s Dhuuxo and Intisaar, the twins—refugees from Somalia who came to D.C. as teenagers. They’re the ones who went with Ursula and me to the RV on the first night. God, Ory, they’re beautiful, and so identical, it’s kind of chilling. When they face each other, it’s like they’re looking into a mirror. They could be each other’s own shadow, practically. Can you imagine what it would be like to look exactly like someone else? Sometimes, when I watch them work together, scrubbing dirty laundry in a bucket of water or counting out portions from our food rations for dinner, always perfectly in sync, I feel a twinge of jealousy amid the awe. What breaks my heart about you and me is that if you lost your shadow too, eventually we could have no idea that we belonged together or that we’d meant anything to each other at all. There’d be no evidence, no physical proof. But these two, Dhuuxo and Intisaar, they would know. Even if all memory left them, when they looked at each other, they would know that they’re bound together somehow. Imagine what kind of comfort that would be.
But what I’m really dying to know, what I hope I can work up the courage to ask—admit it, you’d be just as curious as me: do you think they lost their shadows at the same time? And more—do you think they forget the same memories at the same time, or different ones? Together, could they be one complete person?
The rest—Wes, very tall; Lucius, somewhat handsome; Ysabelle, with such gorgeous long, blond hair; and Victor, the one with a massive tattoo of a lion on his shoulder—I know less about, and mysterious Zachary least of all. They’re quieter than Ursula and the twins, watching more than speaking. They lost their shadows earlier, so they have forgotten the most. With Ysabelle and Victor, it’s a sad story, Intisaar told me. They met in high school and eloped as soon as they graduated. They’d just sent their youngest off to college a few months before the Forgetting reached the United States. Now they don’t remember they were ever married. Intisaar says the only reason they know they ever loved each other at all is because Ursula tells them so, because she met them during the last year that they were still whole.
I’m rambling, but there’s still so much to tell you. Thank God I could still read when they found me, is all I can say. I can’t imagine what would have happened to them if we hadn’t met, and they’d just continued the way they’d been going. They’d been driving straight west for days, completely off course. They never would have reached New Orleans in a hundred years that way.