Sam was transported deep within the recesses of her own mind as the Memory Dust flowed through her body. She was aware of where she was, and she glanced around at an endless field of blue flowers, dancing under the gentle kiss of an imaginary breeze. ‘So this is what my mind looks like. But where am I?’
A lone door stood among the blue field. Sam passed through it and stepped into a bookstore. The smell of paper and rain was prominent. She remembered this. Drops of rain pattered on the road outside. She saw a young version of herself strolling through the store, and a boy – Victor – reading the blurb of one of her favourite novels. This was the day they first met, she realised. “That’s a very good book,” she told him.
When Victor left the store, he strode out into the cold rain, hunching his shoulders, the water dripping over his face and soaking his clothes. Sam went after him, on accident at first, as it happened that they left at the same time. “Would you like an umbrella?” she said.
He turned back, frozen for a moment, and smiled, but he did not meet her eye. Sam left her younger version alone when she noticed another door standing upright in the middle of the road. It creaked open and there was only darkness inside, but she went in anyway. She recognised her home immediately; her cat Nibbles lying on the carpet, and the fire crackled in the hearth and the floorboards creaked as she stepped on them. She saw her younger self on the couch, with tears streaming down her cheeks. She remembered that night instantly. Her father said to her, in his low sad voice: There’s nothing more to do, honey, we have to let her go.”
Sam remembered running away and finding Victor in the park. They walked for hours that night. Among the trees Sam passed through another door. There were colourful lights and music on the other side. Sam watched her and Victor dancing jovially within a crowd of smiling faces. She remembered her seventeenth birthday, right after finishing the third-year exams at the academy, when she went to a festival with her friends.
Suddenly the music became muffled and the lights burned brightly like the desert sun. Sam shielded her eyes. Was there some fault in the potion? This was not part of the memory. A heavy gale swept over them. It was no longer night, nor day, as the sky gleamed with pure white, and everything around her turned to ash and floated away in the wind. “What is happening?” she cried. She held Victor’s hand tightly, not daring to let him go too. A horrific silence. Sam and Victor stood in a lifeless world. She watched herself in dismay as the colour of her eyes faded to that wintery grey. Distant eyes of an eternity of years; ever so tired and yet unmissably alive.
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