The Past is Prologue

Chapter One

There was a breath on my neck, a flash of hot air that made my skin tingle and my heart race. I could feel the heat of a body behind me, smell the thick perfume that rolled between us.

Lust.

Every cell in my body tingled, and I yearned to turn around. Desire pooled deep in the pit of my stomach, and I exhaled sharply as lips whispered along my shoulder, not even touching my skin and yet still setting me on fire. What feelings were these? I was sure I had never felt anything this strong in my entire life, but my body would not turn around. I could not make myself. Instead I felt myself walking away from the lips, the breath, the body. Stinging tears ran down my cheeks as I cried in confusion, turning to look over my shoulder only once. I could barely make out through my watering eyes a hand outstretched, pleading.

That hand.

I can see it every time I close my eyes. It is perpetually reaching out to me in the dark. There is a longing inside of me to stretch out and grab it, but I never do. It's fingers are so close to brushing my shoulder that I believe I can feel the ghost of them on my skin. But they never touch me. When they get too close they begin to recede, like I am running farther way the closer they get. The frustration makes me scream in my sleep.

It used to frighten my parents, to hear my cries strangled by my pillow in the middle of the night. But now they are used to the noise, and they hardly wake up anymore. They think I scream because I see the crash playing over and over again in my mind. They think I see that four ton delivery truck rolling towards me with brown boxes tumbling down the highway. I don't tell them what I really see.

Yes the crash scared me. It left bruises, bloody gashes, broken bones, and a split open head. But these things heal, and a year later they did. I recovered almost completely with only a few double joints and nasty pink scars to show for the wreck. But that truck took something more important than a year of my life. It in fact, took three.

Three years of my life, my sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school were completely gone from my memory. Nobody knew at first, not even me. However, slowly but surely I began to realize that I wasn't making certain connections: stories that people told around my hospital bed, inside jokes that I was on the outside of, references to events I couldn't recall. I felt so confused and lost for a reason I couldn't pin point. It didn't help that I pretended nothing was wrong. I had nodded along with the stories and laughed at the jokes as if nothing was wrong. I didn't want to accept that anything was.

It wasn't until a boy I didn't recognize walked up to my bed and gave me a tentative kiss on my forehead that I finally broke down. As his lips touched my skin I felt something inside of me snap. I started hyperventilating and clawing at him like a crazed animal. Quiet screams for my mother squeaked out of my mouth as I pushed the strange boy away. His eyes were wide and he repeated my name over and over as he frantically tried to explain himself, apologizing profusely for being such an ass. He never came back to see me, not even when the doctors explained to everyone just exactly what I had lost. I was told that he was boy I had dated my sophomore year of high school, a relationship that had ended horribly and painfully. My mom had joked that maybe it was a blessing to have forgotten that time in my life.

So with my amnesia out the open, I spent what should have been my first year in college, recovering. I could barely move for the first five months. Casts covered my from nearly head to toe, and I felt like a caterpillar trapped in a cocoon. And slowly but surely, I did emerge as the casts came off one by one. My mother had cried the first morning I walked down the stairs by myself. My body had heeled yes, but my mind was a whole different story. It frustrated me to no end. I considered myself a tough young women, and my steady recovery had been a tribute to that, but my memories continued to elude me no matter how hard I tried to recover them. They were like smoke. I could almost feel them in the back of my mind, but I could never reach them. I waited impatiently for my "epiphany moment", as the doctor had jokingly called it. Though the damage was severe, the amnesia was not supposed to be permanent. He predicate that I would have my memories back in a few months.

He had been wrong.

After almost a year I had lost all hope. My mom told me I was lucky to have gotten away with what I had. I could have lost an arm, or an eye, or even been paralyzed. In a way I knew she was right. I should be grateful, because the loss of three years of memory had not physical effect on my body at all. Quiet often, the amnesia had made me feel hopelessly confused and lost, but it hadn't effected my maturity development or even my muscle memory. At nine months I realized I was still able to drive with ease, and at eleven months I discovered I could still play sports with the same skill level I had my senior year. I even found out that I could remembered my music and school work with surprising accuracy, because memorization and memories were stored in different sectors of the brain. It seemed that everything was falling into place. I had applied to colleges, been accepted to several, and planed to attend only a year later than I should have. Twelve months later, I was packing up the car and hugging my family goodbye. It was almost as if nothing had happened. Almost.

That hand.

I never told anyone that it haunted my dreams. The memories I lost were always depicted in my mind is a depthless black void. I imagined it was much like space, no light and no life. But when my eyes were closed, out of the darkness came that hand.

It was a man's hand. I was almost positive. It was so blurry and translucent behind my closed lids that it was hard to tell, but it... felt like a man. Sometimes I thought I could hear him breathing, and on even rarer occasions I thought I could hear him speak to me. He was my secret. I was worried that if I told someone what I was seeing, they would say I was crazy. I was worried they'd test me, maybe put me on medication that would take him away from me. I couldn't let that happen. That hand was the only memory I had managed to pull from the black void. It reached out to me, like I was supposed to drag the man attached to it out of the darkened corner of my mind and into the present. It was a mystery.

As the car pulled away from the house, I closed my eyes and swallowed nervously. Leaning my head against the cool class, I stared out the window and tried to calm my frantic heart beat. My mom kept her eyes on the road, but grabbed my left hand in her right. The stroking of her fingers on my skin was supposed to comfort me, but nothing could ease my nerves inside a car. Nothing frightened me more. I had only driven twice on my own in a year, and preferred to walk everywhere if possible. But there was no getting around the drive to college. It had to be done, so I closed my eyes and tried to drift off into a numbing sleep.

I saw the hand stretched out towards me in the dark, reaching, always reaching, but never touching.