There is something deeply emotionally stirring to me about the fact that Marissa is the first person Grace remembers from his personal life. Not Stratt, not his parents, not his students, it’s her. Irina Petrova is technically the first name he remembers, but not her as a person.
Imagine you’re Marissa and a dear friend of yours gets yeeted into space without saying goodbye. And you wonder if maybe he never cared about you as much as you cared about him. If over twenty years of shared laughter and meals meant nothing to him.
Then it turns out his boss forced him into it and also drugged him so he’d forget everything but his scientific skills and knowledge for the sake of the mission. And part of you is selfishly relieved because he did care, he must have, he wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye!
But then you realize he’ll wake up and he won’t remember you. Not your name, not how you met, not the inside jokes you shared, not how you stood by him through the loss of his parents and career and his eventual journey to contentment as a teacher. You do not exist to him anymore.
Is this worse? Can a heart break twice? Is a small part of you glad he doesn’t remember you because then he won’t be hurt by the separation even if the empty chair across from you is going to haunt you forever? Because if he remembered you then he’d remember enough to miss you and he’d cry so much and you can’t comfort him anymore.
But then imagine the beetles return and you’re called up by the powers that be because there is a message for you. You hear his voice again, an apology. For leaving without saying goodbye, for leaving a second time because even though he had a chance to come home he has to save another innocent life, a whole planet full of innocent lives.
He says he remembered you the day he woke up. Before almost anything else. He didn’t remember his own name and yet he remembered yours, your face, how you met, how long he’d known you, how you spent every Thursday in each other’s company.
You hadn’t seen him in over a decade at that point. You were resigned to being nothing to him anymore. But twelve light years away, he woke up and one of the very first things he remembered was that you were his friend, and that he liked to make you laugh.
