She couldn’t open her eyes.

She wasn’t sure she had eyes.

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Someone said-

I can’t remember what they said.

I can’t remember who said it.

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Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Am I dreaming?

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I was doing something.

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I was somewhere. I was doing something.

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Sometimes she was. Sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes her name was there, but it was writing from a dream, refusing to resolve itself into letters her brain could make sense of.

She knew who she was, of course she knew who she was, she just couldn’t...express the answer right now.

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Fractured and refracted, reflected and mirrored and thoughts doubled in on themselves.

She wanted to open her eyes, wanted to-

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She’d been doing something.

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It would be better if she knew she was breathing. Better if she could open her eyes. But things were never ideal. Things never went her way.

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Stef.

The answer came without fanfare or revelation, but it was finally a point to hang the rest of the distorted memories around.

Stef. She’d always been Stef, even when she’d only known her name was Stephanie. Even when she’d been too young to start to hide parts of herself under a different name, there’d been some...Stef-ness hiding beneath the surface.

And it was her anchor, to the world and to herself, something she had forged for herself, something she knew she had created, even when she’d been alone, because she was always-

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A record skipping, a file not found, a pixelated image refusing to become clear.

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Darkness. A red ball. Blue, someone keeping her safe.