Entwined

Nightmare

The bedroom is strange. Unfamiliar. I don't know where I am, how I came to be here. I don't know how I'm goint to get home.

My eyes adjusted and I look around in the near-dark. First, I need to use the bathroom. I look up in the mirror.

The face I see looking back at me is not my own. The hair is cut much shorter than I wear it, The skin looks pale and lips are thin. I cry out, a wordless gasp would turn into a shriek of shock were I let it, and then notice the eyes, I can see that they are mine. The person in the reflection is me, but I am few years too old, twenty maybe or more.

This isn't possible. 

I step back, away from the mirror, and it is then that I see them. Photographs. Taped to the wall, to the  mirror itself. Pictures, interpersed with yellow pieces of paper.

I choose one at random. Aisleen, it says, and an arrow points to a photograph of me - this new me, this old me - in which I am sitting on a bench on the side of a quay, next to a man. The name seems familiar, but only distantly so, as if I am having to make an effort to believe that it is mine.

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a tehn, a before, tough before what I cannot say, and that there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long silent emptiness that has led me here, to me.

 I go back into the bedroom and saw an envelope inserted on a journal on the table beside the bed. There and then, I've checked what is inside it.

LETTER TO THE NEW AISLEEN

I pray that this letter will have gotten into the right hands. I pray that you will not scorn it for what strange notions it contains and will understand with ardent sincerity with which I have written it. I am Aisleen Rowe. If this letter reached its intended reader then I am you, I believe, your past does no longer exist in your mind. I know that sounds despicable and impossible to believe. I felt the same way. But please try to believe it. Someone said once to me that there are ways for one to remember, but I myself am not sure. I believe that you still have dreams about another world where only you can live and maybe you even dream of ‘me’ and ‘Will’. Nightmares as you will consider it are times when you remember the dearest to you, your mom and dad, and the accident that made you live a miserable life now. You will be irritated and confused. 

Please do keep track of your life into a writing with this letter so that the future me/you will understand that is our only path to salvation.

Aisleen Rowe