“The Memory They Gave Me” - Chapter One

Chapter One: The Recurrence

I never walk through a door. I never remember stairs. But I am always there—on the second floor of a two-story wooden house that smells like forgotten time. The walls hum like they’re listening. The windows show a sky that twitches, like it’s remembering how to be blue.

I am not alone. Friend stands beside me. He doesn’t speak, but he’s always calm—like he’s been waiting here longer than I’ve been alive. His eyes follow the shadows in the corner of the room, like he sees things I can’t yet.

She enters with the same creak in the floorboards every time.

An old woman. Her back bent like a question mark. Her dress frayed at the hem. Her voice is made of whispers wrapped in warmth, like something that shouldn’t be comforting but is.

“Back again,” she says. “You came early this time.”

“I don’t remember coming at all.”

She smiles, but not with joy. With confidence. As if she knows I’ll say that.

“You always forget the door,” she says, pouring tea that smells like dried roses and ash. “That’s how the story keeps going.”

I glance at Friend, but he offers no signal. Just a quiet stare, like this is a test I need to fail myself.

She steps closer. Her skin shifts like wax under a candle. Wrinkles draw back. Her voice tightens. Her hair darkens. Her eyes—green now—hold mine with youthful clarity. She becomes a girl in front of me.

“You’ve forgotten a lot,” she says, “but you remember enough to come back.”

She reaches toward me, hand open. I don’t take it.

“You’re not real,” I say.

“Neither are you. Not fully. Not yet.”

And then the visions come.

Not like flashbacks, not like dreams. They open in the air, like curtains drawn from an invisible theater. I see lives. Other lives. Girls laughing on a beach I’ve never walked. A mother I’ve never known tucking me into bed. A name I don’t recognize being called, and I turn to it.

“You lived all of them,” she says, her breath now near my neck. “You’ve just been scattered. Broken. But I can put you back together.”

I start to drift—eyes heavy, body numb. Her voice wraps around my thoughts like vines pulling me into sleep inside sleep. She leans closer, too close. Her face is almost mine now, or maybe mine is almost hers.

I ask her a question. A small one. Specific. Familiar.

She freezes.

Just for a moment, her smile shatters. The flicker in her eye vanishes. Her youthful face begins to melt—slowly, like she’s trying to hold it—but age forces its way back through.

She’s old again. Old and crying.

“You shouldn’t remember that,” she says. Her voice quivers. “That wasn’t your truth to carry.”

I back away, breath shaking.

Friend steps forward now. But something’s different. He won’t meet my eyes.

“I have to go,” he says softly.

“What? Why?”

He doesn’t answer. He turns. Walks toward the stairs I’ve never seen before. I call after him, but he keeps moving, his voice drifting behind him like smoke:

“Next time, ask her the other question.”

I turn to the woman. Her tears fall freely now. She screams—not from pain, but from being seen.

The walls bend inward. The room trembles. My vision floods with light. My body begins to shake—not in fear, but like a rhythm is waking in my bones. My arms move. I start dancing—not my dance, but someone else’s. A move I remember from a place that doesn’t exist.

She watches with wide, breaking eyes.

“You’re not supposed to dance,” she whispers.

But I do.

The dream peels away, layer by layer, until there is only the sound of her crying, and my voice echoing in a house I never entered.

And then—

I wake up.

But the world feels… thinner now.

Like I never really left.