The clinic · Published accounts
Colleague accounts.
The clinic publishes a small number of accounts each year, anonymised and with permission, because new colleagues sometimes worry that what they are noticing is unusual. It is not.
Account 44 · filed in the colleague's own words · lightly edited for length
My first week here was uneventful, which I am told is normal. I learned the walk from my house to the Call Center — past the clinic, left at the store, through the long corridor with the windows over the water. By Friday I could do it without thinking about it.
So on Monday, when the corridor took longer, I noticed. Not enough to stop. Not enough to turn around. I simply arrived at my desk later than I meant to.
At lunch a colleague thanked me for helping her with something the day before. I told her she had the wrong person. She laughed. I laughed too.
That evening the woman across the street waved to me from her porch. I had spoken to her before. I am fairly sure I had spoken to her before.
The next morning my neighbour remarked how strange it was that the house opposite had stood empty so many years. I looked across. The curtains were gone. There was no chair on the porch. I thought about correcting him, and then I went to work.
Later I found an old newsletter in the break room. There was a photograph of the harvest supper. I recognised three people in it. One of them had introduced himself to me the previous week. The issue was eleven years old.
There are explanations for all of this and I have gone through them. People resemble other people. Dates get printed wrong. Grief damages memory and so does stress; the clinic has literature about both and I have read it. Providence is an old place and old places collect coincidences.
So I carried on. Until one evening I was standing in that corridor again, and halfway along it there was a door.
I stopped because I did not remember the door being there.
Then I stopped again, because I remembered opening it the day before.
I cannot remember what was inside.
The clinic's assessment
This account is typical and the colleague is well. Everything described is consistent with a first month of rotating shifts in an unfamiliar building, and the colleague's own reasoning — resemblance, misprinting, fatigue — is sound. We would not improve on it.
We publish this one because of its final line, which colleagues find harder than the rest and which the clinic considers the least remarkable part. Not remembering the contents of a room is ordinary. Most people cannot describe a room they left five minutes ago.
Providence never asks anybody to believe something impossible. It only asks you to decide which memory you trust.
The colleague continues in post and has not filed since.
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