Good Morning, Sunshine

Staring at the mirror

~
Take great care of the flower garden in your heart, it withers easly and there are a lot of people out there who want to see your colours fade.
~
There's a lot of fur on a tiger's body and said body is rather big.

The fur also won't let you soak it willingly if a shower head is directed at it.

All of this I learned while washing Jaromir. Those were the practical lessons.

There were others too.

"So, what do you know about my ... about this bodies past?" , I asked while being careful to get the water all over Jaromir's body.

Oh... I thought you'd wanted to learn about how we work together first.

A note of surprise.

He wasn't wrong. I wanted to know as much about him and I as I could. And I wanted to learn about it as fast as possible. But right now I wanted to learn about the body I was trapped in. About the me from another dimension. This dimension.

"We'll get to that later" , I sighed.

Well, okay then. So, we didn't really share much of our past. We kept our pasts to ourselves because ...

Jaromir stopped and a shudder went through his body. And through mine. The coldness of bad memories, of fear and past trauma held me in a tight grip. It was a cruel feeling and suddenly I was willing not to learn everything about Jaromir's past. Not if it hurt him.

It's alright. I can handle it. The memories I have aren't pleasant ones but they are part of me and I'll have to face them eventually. Suppressed memories don't disappear, they haunt you whenever you let your guard down. And keeping your guard up all the time is rather exhausting.

I nodded.

So, there are very basic memories that are constantly somewhere on our minds, even if we don't search for them. We most often don't even realise that they are there. Those are intimate memories. Memories of a lover's kiss or a mother's voice and a father's lesson. But it's also the pain of your teacher's bullying and your fear of heights.

It was the same for you ... her. I knew what her mother looked like. And her father and her sister. I shared her love for them just as she shared my love for the mother I'd had and for the siblings I used to play with.

You know what her mother looked like. She looked like yours just as you looked similar to what you look like now back in your world.

Your parents are still alive and so is your sister. Her father is dead. Her sister is dead too. Her mother is disabled. A car crash. You ... she blamed herself for what had happened.

She hadn't been in the car, you know. She had been sick that day. The day when her parents set out to visit their grandma because she was celebrating her birthday. They never got there.

You had been asleep when they left. They didn't want to wake you. They were sure that they'd get the chance to embrace you again when they returned home.

They never came home again.

I sat moveless, tears in my eyes. Her feelings of self-loathing and guilt were washing over me in waves, formerly contained by Jaromir's mind but now free to flood my mind with memories of a person no longer alive.