I woke up in a dark space. All I could see was a blue screen of text floating in front of me. It seemed to be illuminated, but there was no light coming from it to light up the rest of my surroundings. I had no idea what the text on the screen said. I just wanted it to go away so I could see where I was when it disappeared.

  I thought my eyes might take a while to adjust after something so bright was in front of me, but once it went away, my eyes did not need any time. I looked around me, and it appeared I was in a small, carved-out cave, chiseled out of a concrete-and-stone building. It was less than a meter tall, maybe a couple of meters deep and wide. There was a mix of newspapers and scraps of clothing that I was lying on, which reminded me of Time Out, but it was slightly soggy. I can’t remember the last time I had wet myself while sleeping. While everything around me did not smell fantastic, there was no overwhelming smell of piss, so I did not think that was what happened.

  I noticed that something was wrong with my body. The pains that I felt all the time were not present. The constant ache in my foot was not there. I could not feel the pulsing pain when I moved my eye. It always felt like I was pulling on my missing eye, causing it to fight back.

  Wait, why does it feel like I have two eyes again? I brought my hand up to my face, and I could feel where my missing hole had always greeted me before. I could see my hand as it got closer and closer. It finally touched my completely intact eye. It stung a bit, but that minor pain was nothing compared to the fact that I had an intact working eye on the left side of my face once again.

  I would have jumped up in excitement, but the ceiling's height made that a very dangerous prospect. I would likely have to crawl out of where I was sleeping. I could not see anything else around me except what seemed like a number of chunks of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling. It looked like I had been lucky that none of those chunks had ended up smashing my skull while I slept.

  Making the decision, I finally started crawling out of the hole I found myself in. My hand knocked into some small piece of metal that clattered out of the hole as I did. It looked like a small cylindrical piece of metal that was smashed into a pancake at the end. I only glanced at it for a second because my surroundings just got drastically more interesting. It looked like I was still in a surprisingly small room, but this time it looked way more intentional. The room was maybe a 3x3x3-meter cube, made of red brick.

  The small room was covered in pictures drawn on paper, affixed to the walls with various methods. The papers were all different sizes, and most were not drawn on plain white paper but on random scraps of newspaper or receipts. There was also no consistency with what was used to draw them. Some could have been pencil and pen; others may have been charcoal. There were a few in color that probably meant whoever made them had gotten their hands on some crayons.

  The biggest drawing was all in black and was drawn right over the door. There was a skull and crossed bones with an arrow pointing at the door. Then there was a picture of a sandwich, a different arrow pointing to another group of paintings, and what looked like a homemade picture book stapled together. I looked at the pictures first. There was a little map with a bridge next to a park, then a bunch of other landmarks drawn. There was a smiling one-eyed kid standing next to the bridge. I guess that was supposed to be me. I was not sure how I grew my eye back, but it seemed like it must have happened recently.

  The map labeled several buildings, indicating different types of food, and each had a different representation. I guess this was a map on how to get to specific places in the city where they sold different types of food. I had no idea how I would pay for said food because I did not see any money around, but I guess I should tackle the problem one step at a time.

  Continuing my art tour, I found a picture of myself. I had the same missing eye, and I was hiding in a tree, covered with a blanket, while angry birds flew all around the tree. The birds, which I guessed were falcons, were large, with blood dripping from their talons. I looked at this picture and understood that the Falcons were still looking for me, and I needed to remain hidden to stay safe. I was starting to understand why there was a danger symbol drawn above the door. I still had no idea how I got here or how I got my eye back.

  The next picture was confusing. It was a picture of three people standing around with balloons, then arrows going from those pictures to my eye, but there was also a hole in the back of my head that the three people and balloons fell out of and disappeared into a puddle on the ground. Then I walked away from the people with a sad look on my face. The following picture was the same three people with balloons, but instead of the arrows pointing to my eye, they pointed to a paper I was drawing on. Then it showed me walking away with a smile, holding the picture of the people and their balloons.

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  I had to spend a long time thinking about what was being conveyed here. It seemed vital for me to understand this set of pictures. It seemed clear that the picture indicated that if I drew what I saw, I would be happy. It seemed more than that, though, because there was the fact that all the things that were seen fell out of the back of my skull onto the ground. I did not remember anything about what was going on around me. That was my hint. It was memory; I could not remember anything unless I drew it into a picture.

  Once I figured out that much, all the pictures around me made a lot more sense. They also hold great significance to me because they were the only memories I had after I was taken to see Domingo.

  The packets of drawings below the pictures were actually just slightly different replicas of the drawings above. I made sure to grab one of the packets because I did not know when my memories would suddenly disappear. I had no idea how long I had been living in a constant cycle of forgetting. It seemed like a terrifying prospect to be forced to live the same day over and over again while the rest of the world around you progressed and changed without you.

  I guess this was my reality now, but I needed to see every scrap of information in all the pictures on the walls and the loose papers strewn around the floor. This was who I was, and I would need to draw my own pictures to add the person I was today to the collective identity that was my life now.

  As I looked through the pictures, I noticed that the technique used to draw them was drastically different from picture to picture. There were even a few that had writing on them. I could only guess that there were more than just me drawing all the pictures. I decided to draw a picture of me with a healed eye because I did not see any pictures of me with both eyes in any of the pictures. It must have been something that happened to me very recently.

  I found a working pencil and a pile of unused paper scraps near the door and tried to think of what I needed to draw on the paper to portray the incredible event of my eye coming back. As soon as I had the thought, I had an image of what I wanted to do. It was an incredibly detailed image of my face in 3 different snapshots, one with my missing eye, one with my face halfway healed with the eye partially attached to my face with skin twisting around it to form the eyelids, and finally, my face fully healed to how it was before Domingo had punished me for my mother’s mistake. It was like I was being possessed by a ghost of an artist, because in a matter of minutes, the picture I had imagined had come together in such detail that it had astonished me.

  I had no idea what had come over me, but I could only guess that while my memories were not being made properly, my skill at drawing had been improving with the constant pictures that I had been creating. The dread that I had been feeling for a while had started to ebb slightly after I figured out that I was not just stuck in a perpetual cycle of forgetting. It was not perfect by any means, but the fact that I had been improving at one thing made me feel like there was purpose to my struggle.

  This improvement in my drawing also explained the different qualities of the pictures. I had been thinking there must have been many people contributing to my history, but this narrowed it down to just two distinct artists. The pictures with writing on them and the drawings that I had done while improving.

  I had learned to read a few words when I was in school, but in the long years of living in Time Out, I had forgotten the few things that I had learned. I could not read any of what was written there, and I guess there was no point in trying to learn now, since anything I tried would be forgotten in some unspecified amount of time.

  I wondered where this mysterious second artist was. The question of whether they were still around or if they had left me to fend for myself would not stop rolling around in my head. This mystery was what finally got me fully invested in digging into the pictures. Understanding everything that had been happening was not a simple thing to pursue, but identifying my ally in this world I knew nothing about was something I knew how to work towards.

  Many themes were captured in the drawings. The most prominent of all the drawings was the hiding spots. It seemed like there were hundreds of drawings of hiding spots all over the woods, and also in the city. I would have to check for myself, but I imagined the park depicted on the map was not just a few trees and a playground, as I had imagined.

  In a lot of the pictures of the hiding spots, I could see there were angry men with guns looking for me. It took me a little while to identify who the men were after looking through these pictures. I finally had a detailed picture with a face that I recognised. It was Boss, or Assistant Guy, as he now liked to be called. The fact that the Falcons were after me should not have been a shock to me, but I had no idea why they would have let me go, just to start looking for me once again.

  This was very important information to have, and I knew I would want to know more about what was happening, but I needed to figure out who my Ally in all of this was. It seemed less and less likely that I would have been able to survive without any memories on my own; someone must have been helping me, and I needed to figure out who it was.

  I started to dig back into the pictures. It was not as simple as understanding things right away. A lot of what I was doing was guessing what specific things meant. I mean, I only thought the guys who were looking for me were enemies because of the angry looks on their faces, and how I looked scared while hiding. It could be that Assistant Guy was my ally, and he was angry because I had to hide from another threat.

  I did not want to overthink things, though. I wanted to go based on my impressions. The person who had drawn these pictures was me, after all.

  Grabbing the next stack of papers on the ground, I dove right into them when I heard the door to my small room start to open.