nathaniel

They had never seen a condition like his until the unfortunate incident in which everyone was luckily left with a few scratches apart from what would be cited as the very big scratch on him. Nathaniel was the only person to ever walk on our earth and have no enemies. And if he ever once did, they quickly resigned and became his friend. Even people who lived across the globe from the far stretches of his small hometown and eventually heard about him would settle with their initial judgments and find peace with, and within, Nathaniel. This effect on people that Nathaniel had never felt creepy in ways that it could be, it just simply was. It was almost natural and until that era, even taken for granted.

Before you think that he must have been called “Nate” or “Nathan” for short, he was not. He was not one to shorten things for the sake of it or take the easy way out even though things came without difficulty to him as he was raised in a privileged neighborhood in a well-to-do family with parents who never asked for much except for their kids to be kind to everyone, and true to themselves. His two mothers were both veterinarians in their shared clinic which was extremely successful, beyond what you could ever imagine an animal hospital practice could be. In his childhood, he was rather taciturn but described as angelic. The years flew by for his parents when the family found their children to be happy in their young adulthood. His younger sister was an aspiring student in human resources in her third year of high school in a way that seemed a bit too prideful yet admirable to others. Nathaniel had been enjoying his summer before his senior year in undergraduate studying agriculture in their local college, which always shocked people because his high school years were filled with American sports that led to a substantial athletic build he kept throughout the years.

The young man was handsome and had a calming and agreeable personality. He was popular with everyone in every kind of way. However, he appeared as the most unassuming young man throughout his life. It was only when he would talk to you, have a fleeting interaction with you, or be indirectly exposed to you through people or other means such as social media that would immediately convince you he was not a typical boy. Of course, this would incite people’s insecurities very often. His unwavering, quiet confidence and continuous overextending care for people didn’t help, nor did his unapologetic demeanor about his financial comfort which he would without hesitation utilize in helping others and causes. These people would have rageful private stints about him and would be quickly met with a serendipitous encounter with Nathaniel that would change everything for them. Oh well yes, he’s just a guy with good intentions. It was rather rash of me to judge him. There’s nothing to dislike, really. Once one’s good opinion of him was gained, it was never lost again.

This led to every single person who knew him to crave his attention. People would be silly from time to time about it, but that was a thought that would never cross Nathaniel’s mind. Girls who were romantic suitors would have the most luck with him and that never bothered anyone. He would accrue quite a list of exes that eventually to their last breath in their old age speaking about him would still champion him as the most special partner they’ve ever had who taught them about the love they deserved.

Nathaniel was simply the town’s shining boy. So when the tragedy happened, it affected everyone and everything. He was staying in his family home for the holidays and had gotten into a car accident while out with some childhood friends for a late night out in town. It was not a pretty sight but everyone involved miraculously survived. Nathaniel experienced a concussion and appeared to be recovering well until issues with his memory became increasingly worrisome. He began to develop short-term memory issues with recognizing and recalling people he knew in a startling pattern, everyone except for his family members. This shook Nathaniel’s girlfriend at the time to her very core, and at their impressionable age, she did not do very well with this development. His family was told that memory issues were a possibility with his injury, but it was determined that something was very wrong, and his case was immediately taken on by the nearby major metropolis hospital.

Students and people in the community all around made shrines for Nathaniel to recover and regain his health. Even though he wasn’t dead, there were memorials held often for people to gather, shed tears, and pray for his recovery to be the boy everyone knew and loved. Nathaniel never commented on these events when they were mentioned to him, but you could tell he was hiding a small exasperation about it.

Time seeped its fingers around Nathaniel’s family and their anxieties as days of testing would go on and on to postulate what was happening. Nathaniel did not feel stressed about any of what was occurring. Meanwhile, his friends from all across the globe would keep in touch with him through the phone, and that was what mostly kept his parents and sister together - seeing Nathaniel laughing as his usual self amid everything else he had to go through. His family had thought that it was a blessing that during those times he would call his friends he still remembered fondly and carried on normal conversation. Though, doctors and scientists caught on to something particular about Nathaniel that blew everything they knew about neurology away, and sent them into a frenzy.

The test that was promptly implemented was one that was stripped into simplicity and rigorously repeated for days on end before they would try anything else, and it only involved Nathaniel and one other person who was not of his family. He would sit in a room on his own, and a woman would enter the room and introduce herself as a doctor to him. They would casually chat with each other even though the woman’s speech was scripted beforehand. She would share certain facts about herself, and then fictitious stories about what was currently going on in her life. One of which was about a modeling opportunity that she was excited about. Nathaniel was very supportive of her and even complimented her ambition and understanding of the craft and history of fashion. The woman would leave the room saying that she had to use the bathroom. When she returned, she would tell him that just then, on her way back to the testing room, she received an e-mail that she was selected for another round of auditions as a model. Nathaniel would be ecstatic by this news and congratulate her. She would gush about it and share some things that were indirectly related to certain facts she had previously told Nathaniel. He would reassure her with those certain facts about the woman pertaining to the situation. At this moment, the woman would receive a phone call and excuse herself to take it. Afterward, she would return to the room and share with Nathaniel that it was her boyfriend calling her about groceries and that when she shared the news with him, her boyfriend was not very pleased. The woman would be visibly trying to hide that she was upset, and Nathaniel would prove to be keen on this and cheer her up. All this emotional talk would lead to the woman expressing that she felt like she needed a snack and would head to the vending machine, asking Nathaniel if he wanted anything. After he requested just a water bottle, the woman would leave and then come back with his water bottle. At a 100% rate, Nathaniel always completely forgot who this woman was at this phase and would reintroduce himself to her before she would cycle through her scripted speech to which Nathaniel would receive as new information. This test was repeated for about a week.

It was at this point that Nathaniel and his family were told that it seemed Nathaniel had a short-term memory loss with people at a rate of three meetings. This was a fact that Nathaniel would remember for the rest of his life. When the same test was continued, Nathaniel would warn the woman before she would leave for the vending machine that he was going to forget her the next time he saw her and wanted to let her know that he was going to deeply appreciate her for the water bottle, that he wished the best of luck for her dreams, that she had nothing to worry about because everything was going to be fine. He would always say this without a hint of sadness. And then it was at this point that they had to switch the woman for another tester because she started to cry uncontrollably during the test and also often outside of them. It was overheard during one of her breakdowns that she had broken up with her actual, non-fictitious boyfriend.

They began to change different parameters of the test. The room type and size, the number of people in the room with Nathaniel, the distance at which they stood from him, the manner and how long they interacted with him, their body language and gestures, the amount of information they would share, and the total amount of time during each phase. Nathaniel never once complained about this, nor did the passage of time concern him with the growing gaps of memory in his mind after having resets of information repeatedly given and taken into oblivion. He could feel that he was being useful and was eager to subject himself to figuring out what could be possibly done after all of this. When meeting people, he wasn’t bothered nor fearful of what he perhaps didn’t know about them compared to what they could have known about him. Anything that could have transpired he of course spent quite a good amount of time imagining. But he trusted in people that their ambitions didn’t push anything to unethical extremes. And so he would take every person as an opportunity to get to know someone new.

When tasked with the exercise to recall every single person he knew, Nathaniel listed a substantial number of people. Given, there was a handful of prominent people and friends who were missing from the list. But it became unsurprising to the doctors after their series of tests. The entirety of his family line was included in his list. Most of the rest from the list were people he hadn’t seen in person in a long time, including those he kept in contact with through the internet and shared messages. The people on Nathaniel’s list were offered to participate in testing with the known risk of the doctors’ findings. As compensation, therapy was offered limitlessly. Only a small number of people in varying closeness to Nathaniel agreed to partake; they all believed in Nathaniel that he would either recover from this or believed simply that they would always be friends because of his nature even if Nathaniel would forget everything they shared together. They were proven right in the sense that Nathaniel would quickly befriend them again, and that he began to catch on to people’s state of mind through their faces and the way they smelled. He would say that he recognized when the person in front of him had known him for a very long time, particularly since childhood. But he would never raise that as a topic of conversation with people out of politeness. It was easy for him to make them feel assured again in whatever way they somehow never knew that they needed. This didn’t happen with people that he met within or less than the recent years. Nathaniel’s girlfriend needed some time before she would relentlessly try to see him often, and then she realized that she wasn’t cut out for any of this and succumbed to being a stranger to him and his family. She did, however, eventually self-publish a memoir about her experience titled, “How I Knew Nathaniel”.

His condition seemed to stabilize and didn’t stray from the conclusion of what meetings consisted of for every person: being face to face, occupying the same space within eight meters, and mustn’t go without showing your face to him longer than three minutes and ten seconds. There wasn’t a need to keep up with the conversation to contain the whole of the meeting. At first, people weren’t used to the newfound rules and there would be some fumbles. Nathaniel never showed signs of being tense about the rules. It interested him when he suddenly became aware of an impending limitation and enjoyed observing people being oblivious before the reset would happen. There were times he would stay silent, and there were times he would speak up to them.

As the next steps were being deliberated, Nathaniel’s family was hoping he could return to his studies. This whole event had pushed his sister into pursuing neuroscience instead. After another array of tests and scans, Nathaniel was able to return to his life and continue completing his degree with adjustments so that there wouldn’t be complications. At his school, a new counseling program was quickly formed by the mental health office to help everyone adjust and cope. The question of how he would have to design the rest of his life was something he and his sister spent everyday working on after his graduation (during which a small mistake had occurred and Nathaniel ended up forgetting his mentor). There were people, mostly strangers, who showed up at the hospital in tears begging to see him one more time. Most of his friends kept to the internet to maintain their connection to him out of fear of not knowing whether their desire to see Nathaniel again would trigger his condition. A few brave ones would decide to meet him to cherish their time together as much as they could and spend the rest of their lives calculating their remaining two meetings. Later on, some would even realize they had miscalculated when they saw him last and suffered the loss of his memory of their friendship. Several people had been too hasty in their chosen meetings with Nathaniel in a way that wasn’t their fault. Overthinking on a person’s part would lead them to their very own despair. Debating and vacillating on whether they should share their thoughts and sentiments with Nathaniel at the very point in time, and from turning away from him with a mind anxious and wandering too long they would breach the limits of his memory, and at a head’s turn looking back at him they would see an innocent look from Nathaniel that would make their stomachs drop.

During his studies, Nathaniel’s mind would often trail towards thinking about someone he encountered during his testing that he parted ways from after their first meeting. After graduating he successfully found the person again through e-mail, and together they thoroughly planned an outing that they would both remember forever. What drew Nathaniel to this person was the feeling of immense overflowing understanding and a beautiful inner solitude from them in the time they shared talking to one another. And, she had a great smile that never left his mind.

This woman of course interested Nathaniel’s family, eager to meet someone who was implicitly claiming they were capable of living the irregular life of being close to Nathaniel at this stage in their lives. She was a few years older than him. They started dating and made sure they didn’t stumble upon each other when they were out and about, living their lives in tandem that was kept online even when they eventually married a year into Nathaniel’s job as an agronomist. He excelled in this one job for the rest of his life.

After the birth of Nathaniel’s child and his nieces and nephews, they found that the following generations after his own were not immune to his condition. The repeated surprise that flickered in his heart upon seeing a newborn in his own home and reckoning with the preciousness that filled his heart in knowing that it was most likely his own with his beloved wife was met with tenderness from Nathaniel. The sacredness of a new life ringed in his arms, swaying slowly with his child in renewed wonder. The house they lived in was designed so that Nathaniel and his wife lived together but never saw each other, a love with voices between walls that never wavered. They never had a mishap. Nathaniel and his wife also adopted several children. Nathaniel’s family took pristine care and measures to help raise his children and equip them as best as they could, allowing his memory resets to exist as part of their lives. His sister was relentless in it and made sure no one ever knew how much, just to make no one worry. Nathaniel showed them the lengths of his unending well of love and compassion. His children would tell people he was a wonderful father.

As his family grew along with more grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and found family members, they all had to be accustomed to the ways of his condition. The children were always reminded how Grandpa tends to forget people, but he still loves them all very much. Nathaniel’s personality in his older years grew into an undeniable calming force that made people confident just by listening to or speaking with him. On a large wall of his home was a mural of their family tree of every single one of them. On the hallway table next to it was a storybook on the family members' history, updated and read often by Nathaniel. At a certain point, his family no longer cared about the rules of his condition. Their Nathaniel was just Nathaniel through and through, always and ever. He stayed healthy and continued his check-ups to ensure his brain health into his aging years. Eventually in old age, Nathaniel and his wife were still very sharp people. They were active and nimble, keeping busy while deep into the years of living in their particular way.

One day in the kitchen of their home, Nathaniel suddenly fell to the ground suffering a seizure, making a noise that stung his wife who was reading upstairs to run and fling open all the doors to find him. At the hospital he was first sent to from the accident all those decades ago, Nathaniel began deteriorating unexpectedly and very quickly. Nothing from his check-ups prepared anyone for this to happen. It turned out that the big scratch on Nathaniel never went away. At the age of 98 on his deathbed, Nathaniel was surrounded by the entirety of his large family as he was slowly slipping out and away to the next door beyond all of them. He looked at everyone in the eyes with a smile. Before he passed, he was able to say,

“You are all so beautiful.”

Nathaniel lived quite a happy life.