dissociative fugue

i read an article in the NY Times this morning about a girl named Hannah who disappeared while out for a run on Riverside Drive. she reappeared in the water off staten island three weeks later. she's fine now. she has no recollection of the three weeks she was missing because she had DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE, a condition i think sounds like the name of an opera. aka the affliction of matt damon in Bourne Identity. the article informs me:

The Bourne character takes his name from Ansel Bourne, a Rhode Island preacher who suffered the earliest recorded case of the condition when he was en route to Providence in 1887. The preacher continued to Norristown, Pa., where he opened a store and lived with another family, until one day he “woke up.”

basically, people who have D.F. remember how to do stuff (even check their email in the case of miss Hannah) but they don't remember who they are. i'm kind of obsessed with this. where did she eat? where did she sleep? NOBODY KNOWS. and she didn't die. she just ended up dehydrated, with a blister and a sunburn. she could have developed fricking superpowers in the interim and vanquished evil. she didn't even have any money. i just think it's wild that in our identity-obsessed culture, some people's brains can go so haywire that they block out their own identity altogether.

incidentally, this girl went to Bryn Mawr, which was an influenza escape community during the 1918-1920 pandemic. my dad is named after his uncle, james david cerretti the 1st, who died in this pandemic when he was only 19 years old. so i was reading about it one day and discovered that there a few random places where people didn't get the flu, or if they did, they didn't die. one of them was this little town here in colorado called gunnison, where my friend jason went to college. even though scientists have all these rational explanations for why this happened, i prefer to think these places have MYSTICAL POWERS.

on a completely unrelated topic, this makes me so happy: