• I stood up, slightly dazed. My child, Jesse was sitting on the floor crying for me. I couldn’t understand why she would cry for me when I was next to her. One of the two police men in the room pulled a cover over the body next to her, covering the face. I knelt down and placed my arms around her in a hug.

    “Jesse darling, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

    It was useless; she disappeared in a puff of smoke. Shock spread through me like a wild fire on a dry prairie. She had disappeared. A tear rolled down my cheek. Several more came down, dying my face a shade of light pink. I clutched my hands on the edge of my skirt and stood up. The nearby police men were chatting about something. I walked over to one of them and tapped his shoulder to ask what was going on.

    He disappeared. In my confusion, I grabbed for the last man, hoping that I could get a grip on reality. He went up in smoke just as my daughter and the other man had. I stumbled and was left alone on the cold stone floor with the body. The coverlet started to soak up the blood. I was afraid. I couldn’t touch the body because I was afraid to lose myself. I gently pulled the coverlet off the body and let it disappear in smoke. The body was uncovered.

    It was me. The body had been mine all along. Why my daughter had cried and why the room was so familiar, it all made sense. I tried to pull my face away from the body but I couldn’t. I was literally the face of death; pale and covered in blood and gore. There were cuts all over my body and a large gash running from the top of my right shoulder to the right hand. It looked painful, but I couldn’t feel it. It was no longer me.

    Tears rolled down so fast that everything was blurred. I leaned closer to the body, afraid to touch it but too weak to resist the urge. While I was in my daze, the walls and ceiling of the room disappeared. They didn’t reveal the yard beyond or anything that was similar to what lay outside of the room. It was white. A white expanse as far as the eye could see. No walls, no shadows.

    As soon as the walls had gone, so did the floor. I couldn’t help imagining that what I was sitting on was a floor, but I now believe that there was actually nothing underneath me. I drew closer to my body. I was desperate not to touch it, so that I would have something to hang onto when all was gone. It didn’t last. The body disappeared without as much as a nudge from me. I was alone, in a white expanse. With the nothingness that resembled my heart and a sadness that could not be torn away. It was there that I went insane.

    I would claw at anything. Not that there was anything to claw at. The floor was still my imagination, and I would forever be living in a hellish dream. I would sometimes think that I was in purgatory, suffering for my sins that I hadn’t repented for. That theory would have lasted if not for the fact that I couldn’t remember any sort of heaven or hell. The only memory I had was the first event that had led me to the white room. The event that became a reoccurring dream.
    If I could have, I would have slept for the rest of my life, living in the one moment of the dream that startled me the least. The part of the dream that held my daughter’s image. I always believed that my memories from life held a strong woman who loved her daughter, but I couldn’t hold onto that because of how quickly I myself had folded to the white room. That, and when I thought of myself I saw the face on the body that had stared back at me with wide shocked eyes.

    The pain that the white room held didn’t last forever, although it seemed like it was just that. The room started to flicker; black and white, on and off. I would sleep during the few minutes that the black was around, even if it didn’t bring about the end that day. One day, I fell asleep during the black moments and didn’t wake up. Not as myself at least.

    It was the second of February; a day that I always thought symbolized my second life. I had been lying on a cot inside a hospital, with an oxygen mask over my face and many wires stuck on me. Some to record pulses and others for things that I could never remember. Either way, I felt like I was suffocating with the mask over my face, so I pulled it off, along with the wires that were attached to me. When I sat up, the thin blue cover from the cot fell off of my body, settling at my feet. I walked around it to look at the hospital room. Everything in that room was new to me. I couldn’t remember much of anything except the dream at that time and so I was extremely curious as to where I was and what everything around me was.

    I walked towards a mirror which intrigued my poorly educated self. It was odd, looking into the reflective surface and seeing my blood covered face. I was shocked at that, and I reached out to touch the face. It disappeared. Things in my life had a way of doing that, and the dream didn’t help the situation. A new face replaced the old one, a younger face. One that wasn’t covered in blood, but was pale and beautiful. The face that hadn’t seen death and hadn’t lived in the white room. It was someone that I didn’t know, and I was afraid of her. I was afraid of not knowing who I was and who the girl in the mirror was. I wasn’t used to seeing anything new, and everything around me was just that. Especially the girl who I saw in the mirror. To me, she was the embodiment of everything that I couldn’t be. After all, she was living a life and I wasn’t. I was dead. Or that was what I thought at the time.

    I turned to face the bed once again, wondering if it would be a good idea to lie down on the bed or not. It was tempting. After all, that bed was the most comfortable thing I had been on in years. I walked towards the bed at a slow pace, not realizing that maybe my time was limited. A doctor ran into the room with emergency equipment and stopped rather suddenly when he saw that I was standing in the middle of the room without an oxygen mask or tubes attached to me. His jaw dropped and looked as if it would reach the floor in a matter of seconds. Shock spread across my face. There was another human in the room. I knew that if I even touched him he would disappear without a trace. That happened every time I had reached out to any living person so far. I hated to think that it was possible for me to lose sight of a person again, so I backed up. I didn’t want him to come near me, because he would disappear. The man looked confused and beckoned for a nurse behind him to put me back in the bed. I continued to back up and tripped over the second bed in the room which I had missed before. When I fell on the bed, the nurse took the chance to rush to me, scaring me out of my wits. I froze, and suddenly realized that she had touched me, soon enough for me to close my eyes and cover my face. I reopened one eye to check to see if she was completely gone and dropped my arms in surprise. She was still there and looking surprised that I had recoiled at her presence. She leaned in and touched my shoulder to comfort me, saying once,

    “It’s okay. You’re going to be alright.”

    My face reddened and tears sprung to my newly blue eyes and overflowed. I couldn’t believe that she was still there, and hearing someone else’s voice made me so happy that I could not stop weeping. As one tear’s salty taste reached my mouth, memories of the ocean came rushing to me like waves crashing on a rocky shoreline. The nurse sat down on the bed and held my small self close to her, rocking me back and forth and saying ‘Shhh’ in the same comforting way that mothers use on their young children. Somehow, I managed to quiet myself and stop the tears, just enough so that when my ‘parents’ arrived, I wasn’t crying.

    When they peered into the door, they seemed just as strange as the doctor and nurse had been when I had first seen them. My new mother was of an average height and had shoulder length brown-black hair that curled outwards on the ends and made her leaf green eyes stand out. She had been wearing a velvet green dress which somehow matched with her husband’s brown suede suit. He himself was about four inches taller than her and his short dirty blonde hair curled in such a way that it made him intriguing and handsome. The one thing that made me stare at him longer than my ‘mother’ was the bright blue eyes of his that sparkled in the light. They pulled me in so far that I felt as if I would drown in their beauty until it dawned upon me that I now had the exact same eyes, covered in the mess of black hair that must have come from my ‘mother’.

    The doctor spoke up and ripped my attention away from my parents. “Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, your daughter Lilli has awoken from her coma quite suddenly. We called you in here again just so that if anything was wrong, we could inform you immediately. Although, she seems to be unusually healthy in comparison to her previous state which was, oh say, five minutes ago.”

    My mother looked towards me uneasily, and then turned back to the doctor, “Is there something wrong with her? She looks…scared.”

    “Well, she may have acquired amnesia. She has been in the coma for about four months which is quite long for anyone. I suspect that it may have had a bad effect on her.”

    My mother turned towards me once again, but this time walked towards the bed and kneeled beside me. When her hand drew close to my knee, I edged away from her, not knowing whether the nurse was a fluke in the disappearance system or not. A shocked expression flooded onto her face and she looked as if she were to cry soon. Noticing the oddity of the situation, my ‘father’ walked towards her and placed his hand on her shoulder. The nurse looked at me, as if expecting me to reach out to the two people that were in front of me, like I had to her.

    “Darling, it’s okay. They’re your parents. They won’t hurt you.”

    When she had said this, I realized that I was looking at them with fear painted across my face. My hands were shaking and they wouldn’t stop. One side of me knew that if I did touch these people who were my so called ‘parents’ then they would disappear, and that was the last thing I wanted. Even if it were a dream or I was in a borrowed body, it was unkind to erase anyone from the world that I was in. The other side of me wished that they would comfort me, assure me that no one would disappear ever again.

    “W-w-who are y-you?” I said, struggling to grasp the words that I needed to say to them.

    “We’re your parent’s sweetie”, said Mrs. Anderson as she reached towards me again. I edged backwards until I fell off the bed and onto the floor. The nurse pulled herself off of the other side of the bed and ran to me, picking up my head which hurt immensely from the fall.

    “Is she alright?” My ‘father’ had walked around to see the damage.

    “It’s nothing that an ice pack won’t fix.” The nurse replied calmly. I hung to her sleeves, worried that she would walk away if I let go of her.

    “What are we going to do?” said my ‘mother’.

    “Whatever we can.”