la pace di Dio

CHAPTER I: "Hello, I am―"

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"Why do you still remember?"

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"Oh."

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Time was a strange, fickle creature. It made you slowly forget, distorting the images in your mind until they fluttered away like elusive butterflies. And no matter how much you tried to hold onto a wisp of shredded memory, it would just teasingly dissolve in your hands.

Time was an enemy of all mankind. It was the fact of life.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, stood against the unbending flow of time. After all, memories faded, people grew older, and the world would unceasingly change. Nothing was ever able to defeat time . . . nothing human, at least.

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"Oh you poor thing."

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Looking back onto it, perhaps that should have been my first clue that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

--

"Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death."

― Titus Lucretius Carus

--

I was three years old. I was a girl. I had blonde hair woven like flaxen gold, orange eyes the same colour as a dying sunset, and a smile that ―according to my snarky but surprisingly romantic father― could brighten the world.

To you, that description probably just flew over your head like the white noise in the background. AKA, it meant nothing. At most, you would have been currently grumbling about how I was just exaggerating my apparent prettiness. Or maybe you would coo over the mental picture of me you have in your head. After all, I was just a cute toddler, right?

Wrong.

I was not three years old. I did not have blonde hair. I did not have orange eyes.

And my father . . . the handsome, dark-haired and slim Italian man with a fedora was definitely not my father. And no, it was not because my hair colour was different from his. Because that was not the problem here. After all, I was certain that I . . . my body was related to him somehow; my nose was sloped in the same manner, and I even had the same shaped mouth.

But still . . . I was also certain that he was not my father because I already have a father, thank you very much. And a mother. And a different life, if we wanted to get technical.

A life that I was obviously not living in.

(Yeah. I was still salty. Bite me.)

. . .

I was three years old when I finally realized that I had been reborn, in a place (and time) far different than what I was used to. Slopping green hills decorated the earth and the sky was a natural shade of blue that would have been impossible with the amount of pollution in the air. Pollution that was supposed to be in the air. The house I lived in was a tiny but homely place, where the electricity I had once used freely was glaringly absent. In addition, people did not speak in any language I knew. The food was different. My clothing was different. Heck, pretty much everything was different.