There is a man who cries when he sees a plant and would collapse if found himself in a garden. Even everyday green objects, not the cheerfully toxic fluorescent, perhaps, but the darker and richer green that hints at a brown being held back, hum a melancholic field that he feels accumulating in his flesh and bonding to his bones. He is too rich to be known; only lawyers, government files, and a guerrilla of memories record his ownership of what used to be the last of the old forests and now the markets mark as being worth more.
There is a man who dreams of the crystalline blue of clean water. He wakes up thirsty but chooses not to drink. Instead he sneaks out of the house his grandchildren still call "the farm" and drives to fields he would have refused to sell if anybody else had wanted them. The night is cold for the year but he remembers colder nights. Cold nights and scorching days, back then. Now only the desperate poor walk the fields when the sun is high. He leaves his truck and walks nowhere in a straight line. They always find him and make him promise he won't do it again.
Every session I ask the doctor which one of these memories is mine. They smile with the infinite patience of pixel dust and tell me knowing wouldn't help me get better and once I am better I will remember on my own. I still ask every session. I know they know why I do it. What question I'm not asking by asking that one. There are things I hold in my memory the way you hold a knife by its blade to try to keep it away. There's nothing red in my cell except what I make myself bleed.