Remember ✓

I look down through the branches of the swooping willow at a woman. Sitting here, at the peak of the sloping hill as I rest my hands in my chin, she seems very far away.

A gust wind explodes through the branches, and my hair is blown in a frenzy of black across my face. Pushing it aside, I see the woman is no longer there.

I look over my right shoulder. Standing there is a man, pale as bone china, with a gold mask obscuring the upper half of his face. His mouth and hands are smeared with something thick and black, as always, and he sighs deeply. "When will you stop watching?"

"When can I?" I reply quietly, my right hand playing idly with a daisy that has emerged from the grass of the hill.

The man stays quiet at first, and just gazes about the grey, washed-out scenery. Finally he says, callously, "When you remember."

Although I am not looking down, I can feel the water approaching again. It flows past the blackened willow and around the man's feet like a gentle tide, and I can feel my clothes and shoes getting saturated with it.

I desperately to look down the hill at the woman again, but she isn't there, and the water is building up faster now. I know what's going to happen next. I brace myself, flinching like a reflex as a huge tidal wave of water bursts over me and shatters the scene I'm looking at. I screw my eyes shut and hold my breath as the pressure builds around me and my hair whips round my face.

Silence.

x

It feels like waking after a deep sleep.

I give a groan as I straighten up, still in the same position under the willow tree. The ground is dry, and the man stands silently next to me. Gazing down, it appears the landscape has yet again repaired itself, just like every time before. The willow tree is upright again, undamaged by the crashing wave, and delicate birds circle the skies above us.

I feel this place is doomed to repeat itself like a tape stuck on loop, and I turn to the man and say, "How many more times will this happen? When will it stop?"

"When you remember," he replies, and he turns back to the scene in front of us.

A glass building towers in front of us, as always, and the woman in the sharp suit talking intently to her colleagues by the door.

I dig my fingers into the wilted grass, determined not to look away this time. My eyes sting from not blinking. It will be the same as always, I knew. The wind would come, and then the water, and the woman would disappear. 

"Goodbye, then," the woman says to her friends. Her voice sounds muted to me, as though through thick glass.

But then the branches explode in the chaos of the wind, and the water flows quickly over my hands. I tell myself not to look away – to keep watching despite anything. The water is up to the man's knees now, and nearly above my chin. But I do not look away. I watch the woman reach the door and –

"I'm sorry."

The white wave bursts forward and my eyes are forced shut.

x

Everything is the same again. The air is cold and cloudy, and those birds are circling the tops of the tree, screaming from above. But I notice something is different, and I try and search my head for what it was.

"You apologised," I tell the man. The surprise shakes my voice a little, forming it into an uncertain stutter.

He doesn't speak. He just watches the scene before us. For the first time, instead of watching the woman, I focus on him.