Chapter One

I awoke again in the middle of the night. Sweat soaked the back of my shirt and matted my hair. I was breathing heavily and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of my room I started to feel relief wash over me. I had been having the same dream I’ve been having for weeks now. An unfamiliar blurred face smiling at me, a feeling of warmth and security, laughter, tears, and then a cold fear coursing through my veins. A desperate desire to run, to escape, but a firm hand trapping me to where I stood. That’s always when I wake up. Everyone tells me that it might be fragments of my memory trying to break through but I’m not sure.

I’m not sure of anything.

My first memory in 6 months of darkness is waking up in this room. This room, “my room”, has been my sanctuary and my prison ever since I woke up. I know it’s my room, I see myself smiling in the pictures on the wall, I see my clothes in the closet, and the furniture I begged my parents to buy for me. It’s just different now. I know it’s mine but it doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like it belonged to the me I used to be, the me I never will be again. The me that knew who she was and what she wanted. The me who didn’t spend every day straining myself to remember the face in my dreams, the me who didn’t cling to a distant feeling of warmth that I couldn’t identify.

I slowly got out of bed and quietly made my way downstairs to get a glass of water. I was careful not to wake any of my family members – although they seem more like strangers to me now. When I first ‘awoke’ I tried to confide my thoughts and fears in them but it always felt uncomfortable. They attempted to understand what I was going through and tried to make sense of it all but in some ways I feel that what happened to me was harder on them than me. While I had returned to my former life with no recollection of where I had been or what I had done, they remembered all too clearly the pain of losing their daughter. They still felt the pain of not really having her, me, back. After a while it became harder to talk about the images in my dreams, and soon we stopped discussing it all together.

I reached into the cabinet to get a few Advil to take with my water. As I opened the bottle my hand slipped and they spread like skittles across the floor.

“Don’t touch that, you’ll cut yourself.”

“I’m not a kid you know, and I’m not stupid either, it’s not a big deal, it’s just glass. Besides, it’s my fault the dish broke so I might as well clean up after myself.” I said dejectedly.

“You know, if you had just waited two seconds I would have handed it to you anyways.”

“But you were eating all the green skittles and you know those are my favourite.” I put my hands on my hips and stuck out my bottom lip. “You’re always teasing me, it’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t always fair kid, haven’t you learned that by now?”

And then it was gone. Another jumbled, confusing piece of my memory. Another glimpse into a life that used to be mine. We were in the kitchen, not the kitchen in this house, but a much smaller, messier one. I was wearing shorts and a tank top so I assumed it must have been summer. I was talking to the man who invaded my dreams, who owned my thoughts, but his face was still unclear. There was broken glass and skittles scattered across the linoleum but I didn’t care about that. I cared about what he thought of me. I cared about what he would say or do.

I quickly cleaned up the mess I had made, and taking two pills and the water with me I returned to my bedroom. I could hear crickets chirping outside my window, hear the wind as it rustled through the trees and whistled around the house. I felt alone and at the same time completely at peace. I felt as though in this moment I didn’t hurt, I wasn’t hurting others.

I downed the pills quickly and rested my head on the cool metal headboard. I closed my eyes and started counting backward slowly from one hundred as I had done often when I was young. I relaxed as the pills started to take effect and my counting became less focused. I drifted to sleep without a thought in my mind for the first time that evening.

When I awoke late the next morning I could smell breakfast already cooking. I could have easily curled up under my covers the whole day but my stomach growled loudly in protest. When I reached the kitchen I could see my father and sister clearing their plates at the table while my mother began rinsing dishes and putting them away.

“Sophia.” My father said as a statement, “It’s good to see you’re awake, your mother and I have something we wish to discuss with you.”

I clenched my fists waiting for whatever bomb they were about to drop on me. My father had always been a kind man when I was growing up. I was Daddy’s favorite and everyone knew it. He would carry me around on his shoulders like a princess until I was too big for such activities. He would buy presents for me on his way home from work, sometimes candies, sometimes stuffed toys. I was always his little girl until suddenly I wasn’t anymore. When I first saw him after I awoke he was the most eager to see me, his expression of joy and relief visible for miles. When I spoke though, he knew something had changed. His expression dropped and he became more sullen every day. He no longer called my by my silly childhood nicknames, now it was simply ‘Sophia’. He hadn’t spoken a single word to me for days and I was afraid to hear what he wanted to say now.

“We’ve discussed it at length and your mother and I have decided that it’s time for you to go back to school. Your principle has agreed, under the circumstances, to allow you to take your exams from last year and depending on the results allow you to continue in the grade you should be now. Because you have missed several months you will be assigned a tutor to help you catch up with your classes. We know how you feel about returning to school but this has become a non-negotiable Sophia.” Again he used my full name. “It is time for you to return to your life and stop being a recluse. You can’t move forward if you never leave this house.”

He got up from his place at the table, carried his dishes to the sink and left the room. I stood by the door where I had been since he first spoke my name and I could feel the air move around me as he walked briskly past. I hadn’t had time to register what he had said. He didn’t give me a chance to plead my case, to beg for one more week as I had done on more than one occasion in the past. It was final. He made that abundantly clear.

My mother cleared her throat and resumed washing the dishes. My sister pushed the remaining food around her plate. Neither of them looked at me. Neither of them spoke. I opened my mouth to begin my protest but immediately closed it again. No one here was interested in what I had to say. No one could understand how it would be for me to go back there, back to the place where it had started.

It was a Friday night long after the last bell for the school day had rung. Long after I had gone home and changed my clothes, had dinner, finished my homework, and snuck out. I was meeting my boyfriend at the football field behind our school for a midnight picnic. I had a large plaid blanket and some candles with me – he was bringing the food. As I skipped along the short distance to the school I felt a change in the air. I noticed how dark it really was this late at night, made even darker by the clouds blocking my view of the stars. I noticed there was a slight chill in the air, quickly forming goosebumps on my arms. I hurried the rest of the distance and began to set up in the middle of the field. I was a little early, a blessing since I had wanted to light the candles before he arrived, but I hoped he would arrive soon. As I straightened the last corner of the blanket I could feel a presence behind me. Turning quickly expecting to see a familiar face, I fell back. The face before me was not one I knew. Shrouded by the darkness, I couldn’t make out his features clearly before I felt a hard object strike the side of my head.

That night had changed everything.

And now they wanted me to go back there.

They wanted me to go back to the place where my nightmares had begun. It was said with such certainty, such nonchalance that it caused an ache in me I didn’t think these people could still inflict.

No longer hungry I returned to my room. I closed and locked the door – something I had insisted on when my younger sister had become old enough to start ‘borrowing’ my clothes – and buried myself underneath my duvet. I began counting back from one hundred and finally fell asleep as a tear still clung wet to my cheek.