Why I'm Not Where You Are – 5/21/63
- We must have a different narrator here, as this chapter is set in '63 (1963, we're assuming) and it's a letter starting with "To my unborn child."
- The narrator tells us about how he lost his speech, word by word, starting with the word "Anna."
- The last word he could say aloud was "I."
- To communicate, he had the words YES and NO tattooed on his palms. YES on the left, NO on the right.
- He carried a notebook around to write in if he needed to say more than YES or NO.
- By the end of the day, he'd usually run out of pages and have to flip back and recycle phrases from earlier in the day.
- He'd save the notebooks all over his apartment.
- Then, whoever's writing this letter tells us about "when I met your mother" (2.1). (Ted? Is that you?)
- She sits next to him at a bakery and talks about loss, canned tuna, and the weather.
- When she wonders why our narrator doesn't talk, he writes "I don't speak. I'm sorry" (2.1).
- She writes in his notebook "Please marry me" (2.1).
- He tries to protest, but she persists.
- He wonders about how he lost the love of his life, how he's hopeless and helpless, and he flips to a page in his notebook and puts her finger there: it says "Help."