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Description
Once I was out of the hospital (very quickly, the doctors were shocked how fast I healed), I was free to return to a home I didn’t recognize. There were a few reporters still hanging around for a bit but, luckily, I was just a blip in the world’s newsfeed and soon I was left alone.

Only, I really was alone. See, apparently, due to the fact that I’d only lived in this town for slightly over a year and due also to my previously introverted personality, I didn’t seem to have any friends waiting to check in on me post-desert-mystery-memory-loss. But I did have Mrs. Ingram, bless her, who brought me homemade casseroles and was always happy to share with me what she knew of who I was - or, uh, who I used to be.

I know that it was an odd situation for her as well, but I could tell that she believed me, which meant so much. But a lot of people didn’t. Sometimes we would walk Lucy and people on the street would stare or snap pictures or talk behind their hands. I didn’t always catch what they were saying, but I heard enough.

Folks seemed to have come to many conclusions about what exactly happened to me (as people completely unrelated to a situation often do). Some believed I had been off my head on drugs and wandered into the desert on some psychedelic walkabout. Some think it was a suicide attempt, a cry for help. But, worst of all, some believed it had all been a hoax, a lonely girl’s desperate bid for attention. And the amnesia? Faked, of course.

What strangers thought shouldn’t have bugged me, but it made trying to re-find my way in the world that much harder. I didn’t ask to be a mini-celeb, a joke, a meme. I didn’t ask to become “Desert Girl.”

But that discomfort paled in comparison to the adjustment of living a “brand new” life in an inherited house where I was surrounded of mementos of a prior existence I felt no connection to. I read my father’s work, I watched videos of my mother flying planes, I sorted through their clothes still hanging in the closets, I read my own emails (I luckily had written my passwords on an easily found Post-It). And every day, just wandering room to room, I looked at photos of a younger me, pictures of a pair of smiling parents, and while I liked those faces and was glad there had been so much love in their lives, I felt no connection to those seemingly happy people. Just a blankness.

Description
Once I was out of the hospital (very quickly, the doctors were shocked how fast I healed), I was free to return to a home I didn’t recognize. There were a few reporters still hanging around for a bit but, luckily, I was just a blip in the world’s newsfeed and soon I was left alone.

Only, I really was alone. See, apparently, due to the fact that I’d only lived in this town for slightly over a year and due also to my previously introverted personality, I didn’t seem to have any friends waiting to check in on me post-desert-mystery-memory-loss. But I did have Mrs. Ingram, bless her, who brought me homemade casseroles and was always happy to share with me what she knew of who I was - or, uh, who I used to be.

I know that it was an odd situation for her as well, but I could tell that she believed me, which meant so much. But a lot of people didn’t. Sometimes we would walk Lucy and people on the street would stare or snap pictures or talk behind their hands. I didn’t always catch what they were saying, but I heard enough.

Folks seemed to have come to many conclusions about what exactly happened to me (as people completely unrelated to a situation often do). Some believed I had been off my head on drugs and wandered into the desert on some psychedelic walkabout. Some think it was a suicide attempt, a cry for help. But, worst of all, some believed it had all been a hoax, a lonely girl’s desperate bid for attention. And the amnesia? Faked, of course.

What strangers thought shouldn’t have bugged me, but it made trying to re-find my way in the world that much harder. I didn’t ask to be a mini-celeb, a joke, a meme. I didn’t ask to become “Desert Girl.”

But that discomfort paled in comparison to the adjustment of living a “brand new” life in an inherited house where I was surrounded of mementos of a prior existence I felt no connection to. I read my father’s work, I watched videos of my mother flying planes, I sorted through their clothes still hanging in the closets, I read my own emails (I luckily had written my passwords on an easily found Post-It). And every day, just wandering room to room, I looked at photos of a younger me, pictures of a pair of smiling parents, and while I liked those faces and was glad there had been so much love in their lives, I felt no connection to those seemingly happy people. Just a blankness.