Never before had the dream been so vivid, so real, but it was lost the moment she gained consciousness. Maybe it was a clue to the past. The past she never really remembered. Half glanced faces. Half remembered destinations. An accident five years previous had stolen the previous twenty three years she had lived. She tried to remember the dream. Grasping at anything that might shed light onto who she was. Ghostly images of drunken ramages. A man with no face bringing her to her knees. The pain. A feeling of helplessness.
She looks up at the ceiling of her bedroom. She wonders if it will ever end. She rolls over and wonders if she shouldn't write something about it in her journal. She hadn't started keeping one till her psychiatrist suggested it might help her remember her dream. She gets up out of bed and makes her way to her desk. She opens up her journal to the last entry. She begins to write:
July 6, 2002
"It has come again. The dream I can hardly recall but is always there. Maybe it is the key to unlocking the mystery. Who I am and what is meant for me. I am not sure how to proceed with my life. I am at a lose. Everything seems to be going well. I just can't seem to sleep. It feels as if my past is calling out to me but my mind wants to forget. I don't know!"
She stands up and looks around her room. She never really knows anything any more. As she stretches, she wonders what all of it means. The paintings of a little girl in many positions of torture. Another suggestion made by a psychiatrist. Another way in which she has failed to call forth the past. She runs her fingers along the spines of shelved books. Hundred of them lining the walls. She reads the titles. With each title there's no light shed. Just more questions into who she is. What she is?
She snaps herself back in the now, focusing on the day ahead. There was work to be done. She had just been chosen by a pretiges art gallery to show her work. She needed to choose two paintings. Or even paint some new ones. She had a week.
She glances at her bedside clock. The red numbers glare at her from there concealing shadows. 12:23 a.m., she had been asleep a couple of hours. She needed to rest but knew she would get no more sleep this night. That was always the way of it. The dream disturbed so much in her life. Leaving her mind racing trying to remember. Making it impossible to lay quiet enough for sleep to reach her.
She decides to take a shower. A nice cool soothing shower. If anything it will help wake her up. Clear her head a bit so that she does not feel groggy through out the day.
She finds her favorite towel and heads towards the bathroom. A flash. Emerald eyes and blood red hair. A small child reaches for her.
She snaps back to herself. She knows that is her. Even though the hair has faded to a pale stawberry blonde and her eyes a faded with weariness.
She walks across the loft to her bathroom. Relishing the feeling of the cool tile floor on her bare feet. She passes the mirror without a glance. She know what she will see there. A woman who is too thin and looks too tired. She was only 23 and she looked like she had been through hell. She felt that she wasn't supposed to look like that. She wasn't supposed to feel the way she did. Her mother had told her that she had had a happy childhood, that her teen years were full of love and happiness. But why did she feel like she had been run down, or run over. She didn't think that her mom would lie to her. But hell her mom could tell her that she had been raised on the moon and she couldn't dispute it. She couldn't even remember it.
She reaches into the shower to turn it on. The water slpashes over her arm and she likes it cold. A flash.
The girl. Reaching for her. A life about to be snuffed out without warning. She feels a presense behind her. Pulling at her to submit. Telling her that if she didn't fight it wouldn't hurt.
She fell. Into the bathtub. She couldn't remember the last five minutes. The easiest explanation is she sliped into the bathtub, hit her head and blacked out. She tells herself that she has to be more careful. She doesn't need anymore head injuries.
She picks her self up from the bottom of the bathtub and starts to shower.
The sun rises through a window that shows a young woman sitting infront of an easal. The paint brush poised to color the white canvas with strokes of pain.
She waited for it to come. The flash of a lost past that she couldn't get her hands on. She didn't wait for long. The paint brush flew over the canvas with fury. Consumed by her work she didn't notice the hours fly by. The reds and blacks melted together to make what she wanted. When she was finally done she glanced at her wall clock. Eleven o'clock. Time for some breakfast and coffee.
She left her apartment the way it was. Usually she would clean it before going out. She liked to come home to a clean home. Today just wasn’t a normal day. Her intuition told her to forget about it and go to the coffee shop at the end of her street and it would all be worth while. It wasn’t like she did have the rest of her day to clean up her paints. Who knows she might want to paint some more when she got home.
She checked to make sure that she had her purse and locked her door on her way out. She was never too careful. Three deadbolts decorated her door and on the inside; left dangling there like a limp rag when she didn’t lock up from inside; was a chain. It had saved her on a few occasions from angry ex-boyfriends that didn’t know what “It is over” meant.
The walk to the coffeehouse was a non-eventful excursion into the real world. It was relatively devoid of the usual gawks that she experiences on her way down a city street. The coffee house, which she had been coming to for a number of years, even before her accident.
The coffeehouse was mostly empty. Not that she minded. The usual crowd that gather had one or two species of the male persuasion trying to convince her that he was the one for her. Her best friend told her it was because, no matter how hard she tried to be unapproachable, she still had the look of somebody that needed to be taken care of. She hated that but she knew that that had to be it. This morning there was a couple in the back reading to each other from magazines on a couch. They looked happy. Not the usual crowd. They glanced up at her from their magazines and went back to reading. She ordered her normal breakfast fare; a tall caramel cappuccino with four extra shots of expresso, and a breakfast quiche. They were made fresh every morning by the manager.
She turned to look at the art on the walls while she waited for her drink to be ready. That is when she noticed him. He didn’t look at her at first but when he looked up from his chair in the corner. She looked into the most astonishing blue eyes. She saw her again. Emerald eyes and blood red hair.
It was night. Something behind her. Something menacing. Bile rose to the back of her throat. She vomited.
“Poe! Poe! Are you okay?” The manager Bryan came running around the counter when he heard her scream and turned around to see Poe drop to her knees and vomit.
Poe was clutching at her head and trying to fend him off at the same time. Bryan notice that she had her eyes closed. This had happened once before. After Poe’s accident, when she tried to resume her normal life. She came in and had a fit like this. She claimed that she didn’t remember a bit of it. He believed her. You really can’t forget something like that. It passed. The fit was gone and she was breathing heavily on the floor. She had fainted. Bryan picked her up and laid her on one of the many couches. He wiped her face where she had laid her head in vomit. He then grabbed a mop to clean up the mess. He hoped that she wasn’t as disoriented as the last time this happened. She had forgotten where she was and where she lived for about an hour.
Poe had forgotten him though. She had forgotten what they had had. He never thought you forgot something like that. She had left him a year before her accident though. It was an ugly break up and maybe it was good she had forgotten. She came around more now. He loved seeing her. Loved hearing her speak. She was so great. Even if she didn’t remember. He didn’t get why she had decided to pick a fight with him the night she left. She had been preoccupied for the whole week before. Not calling him when she was going to be late. Blowing him off. He didn’t know if it had been another man or something else. All he did know was that she changed that week. From a god fearing beautiful woman. To a beautiful creature that was as cold as ice.
