Finally Alone

Lucas kept me chatting for a few more minutes before my phone buzzed a couple more times and I finally broke off to head up to my room. I climbed all the sets of stairs up to the attic, finally closing the door behind me and being alone for the first time since all this began.

I exhaled, slowly, and it felt like I had been holding my breath since all this started.

This was crazy, clearly, but at least I could confirm that somehow this was all real. And while there were a thousand questions swirling in my mind and a thousand things I wanted to try to understand, I held onto one little piece of certainty at the center of it all that I knew could be my guiding ****.

I couldn't be the first person in the world that this happened to.

For the record I know that the internet cannot be trusted and I know that people lie and exaggerate all the time. Unless you get multiple source confirmation, from multiple reliable places, on the truth of something then well you shouldn't trust it at all.

But I had hope that when I started to research, when I began down the path, I'd find something. After all no person in the world is really unique and no experience is wholly singular. We're all just repeating patterns of events that have happened before, so there is no reason to think that there hasn't been someone else who has had this or something like this happen. In fact I was willing to bet there were multiple people out there, and I was willing to bet that I'd be able to find them.

Sure I was dealing with the internet a decade or so back in the past, but that would probably just give me an advantage on finding out what I needed to find. Right?

Not wanting to drive me out here my folks had arranged for all of my stuff to be shipped ahead of time and Lucas being the good guy that he is had carried it all up to my room. There were eight or so boxes filled with my things, everything from clothing to decorations to books. I'd taken everything, pretty much, not wanting to have to leave anything behind in a place I had no intention of returning to.

I moved to the first box and ripped the tape, opening it and glancing inside. This sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity came over me all at once as I stared down at the clothing haphazardly tossed in there and realized that each one of these boxes was a kind of Schrodinger's thought experiment made real. They were both mine and not mine. They were familiar and unfamiliar. They were things that I recognized, but had never really seen before.

These were her things, Emily's. I had left that town and taken every single thing I cared about in the world and she had done the same, but her things weren't my things. Closing my eyes I could go back into her memory and see her packing them, see her painstakingly agonizing over what to take and what to leave and I was seeing those moments through her eyes and feeling her feelings as she did it, but those were not my memories and they didn't feel like them.

They felt like a movie played in first person and vivid surround sound. They felt close enough to be familiar, instantly re-callable, but at the same time not belonging to me at all.

These items aren't mine. Even the ones that are, the posters and the books, I have never laid my eyes or fingers on. And the clothes she brought, the clothes she packed, I've never worn before.

I reach in, fingers dancing over the surface of cotton. I feel it beneath my fingers, tickling its way across my skin. I clench my jaw and my fingers tighten, pulling out the item with both hands and flinging it so it erupts into full form.

The dress dangles from my fingers, the light catching it and highlighting the ruby red. It's the color of spilled wine, of passion and need. It's a color that draws the eye and makes it hard to look away.

And I remember this dress. I remember when she bought it three years earlier on a school trip to the city. She'd hidden it away and she'd never come close to wearing it. The closest she'd ever gotten was dangling it in front of her body and seeing the way it draped over her skin but she'd never taken the leap because she didn't feel like she'd earned it yet.

Emily had unrealized dreams, just like I did. Emily had lived a life of hesitation, one long deeply held breath as she waited for her moment to change. Emily came to this city, to this life, with hopes of making a better future for herself.

Emily was more familiar to me than I might have wanted to admit.

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