01 // The Story
What would you give up to remember who you are? And what would you fight for, to be remembered?
Rowan dances her grief out loud. Every night, from a small apartment in Chicago, she livestreams her body back to life for strangers who need somewhere to put their sorrow. Avery draws theirs in private. A non-binary artist in Seattle, unlinked in a world wired into everyone's skull, Avery maps the things they can't say into sketchbooks no algorithm will ever read.
One drawing crosses the distance between them. Then a year of late-night calls, shared playlists, and a chosen family they name the Constellation. By the time they finally meet in person, at a cabin by a lake, Rowan and Avery already know the truth their bodies are slow to admit. This is home. This is the person.
Then Avery starts to forget.
Small things first. A conversation. A face. Then whole days, peeling away backward. The diagnosis is a virus that steals memory in reverse, and it is coming for everything Avery fought to become. Seattle. Their art. Their name for themselves. And eventually, Rowan.
There is a treatment. It works by erasing ten years completely. Take it, and Avery wakes as a seventeen-year-old who never left the small town that couldn't see them, never became an artist, never met the woman who knows all their broken places by heart.
Some loves ask you to hold on. This one asks whether you can begin again.
Before I Forget You is a queer speculative love story about memory, identity, and the people who feel like home even after you've forgotten the way back.
