The Doctor's Own Notes
Her handwriting, a stranger's record
Searching her that weekend, Elena found a box she did not remember ever filling.
Labelled only with a year, it contained files she used to keep for her most difficult cases.
Opening the first folder, she recognised her own handwriting curling across page after page.
Years ago she would write her notes by hand, believing that typing made her forget the patient.
One file, far thicker than the rest, carried a name she had sworn never to have heard: Marcus Feld.
Reading it, she felt as though she were spying on a stranger who happened to share her hands.
The notes described a man who used to arrive early and sit in silence for several minutes.
He would speak only when the clock reached the hour, as if were a kind of shield.
Written in her careful were observations she simply could not recall ever making.
Patient fears he is slowly disappearing, one line read, underlined twice for emphasis.
Turning the page, she found a sentence that made her breath catch sharply in her throat.
He believes his doctor will forget him, exactly as everyone else in his life has done.
Having read that, she sat , the folder trembling slightly in her lap.
She used to pride herself on remembering every single face that entered her office.
Now, confronted by her own record, she could neither the face nor the voice.
The dates ran across four months, each session noted, each fee recorded, each promise kept.
Judging by the handwriting, she had been calm, , and entirely present throughout.
Yet the woman described in those margins felt like someone she used to be long ago.
Near the very end, the entries grew shorter, the letters pressed harder into the paper.
Session cancelled, read one entry. Do not schedule again, read the next, without any explanation.
Following that instruction came three blank pages, and completely left empty.
Staring at the emptiness, she understood that something had happened there worth hiding.
She would have given anything to remember what her own hand had chosen to leave out.
Notes, she had always taught her students, are a mirror the mind cannot easily .
Tonight the mirror showed a doctor she recognised beside a memory she absolutely did not.
Closing the folder, she wondered how many other selves lay filed away inside that box.
Whoever had treated Marcus Feld, she was no longer certain it had been entirely her.