Life In Gotha

Chapter 1

When Alina first opened her eyes that afternoon, she had no idea that everything she had ever believed deep in her heart was about to vanish forever and be replaced with an alarming new reality.

She felt woozy and her tongue was thick as if she had taken a sleeping pill and was waking up to the after affects, as sometimes happened with her insomnia. She licked her lips and fully opened her eyes. Immediately her pulse quickened, she was in her home, the same home she had grown up in, but it was different. Where the walls had once been wood paneling, they were now a smooth eggshell color. Her shabby chic couch that had belonged to her parents was gone, to be replaced by the oversized brown leather sofa she was lying on. The old gray carpet than had been wearing thin from the path she strode between sofa and the television on a daily basis since she was a child had been replaced by sleek wooden floors. She sat up quickly and suddenly was engulfed in the haze of an anxiety attack, her chest felt tight, her lungs simply would not expand far enough and then the pain that always reminded her of what a heart attack may possibly feel like, the pain that she had learned breathing exercises to overcome with her family doctor until her anxiety medication took effect. She looked around for anything familiar while trying to calm herself and caught sight of her mothers antique secretary sitting in a dim corner of the room. She concentrated on her breathing, this was different but this was her home, the same one she'd lived in since she was brought home from the hospital in her tiny pink blanket by her ecstatic and overjoyed parents. The unchanged secretary in the corner helped to cement that fact and helped her hold onto reality as her mind whirled.

Without warning a small girl appeared in the doorway. She saw the woman and smiled brightly and came running towards her. "Mommy" the small girl crooned and she slithered her small body quickly into her lap as if this was something she'd done a million times. She wrapped her arms around Alina and laid her head against her shoulder.

"Wh-What?" Alina finally managed to stammer and she took the small girls shoulders and held her at arms length. She looked the small child over. She had dark curls held up in a high ponytail and compelling green eyes with flecks of blue around the iris. Those eyes called to Alina somewhere deep inside, like she'd seen those beautiful eyes a million times and the sudden pang of hurt she felt shocked her. She stood the little girl up onto the floor and stood up beside her looking down at her. "Who are you?" Alina asked trying to keep her voice from shaking and the tears from her eyes. "Mommy, you're so silly. I'm Ella." She said dramatically and raised an eyebrow at Alina before bursting into a fit of giggles and running from the room. Bewildered, Alina took a few steps in the direction the girl had gone and then stopped herself. She stood in the middle of the large and comfortably decorated living room and stared at a photo hanging above the fireplace. There in the photo was her high school sweetheart, Mason Scruggs, the small girl she had just encountered and herself. She sat smiling in the photo while the man stood over her with one hand on her shoulder and his other hand ruffling the girls dark curls and smiling proudly. The girl was sitting in Alina's lap half smiling and half giggling looking straight into the camera.

What was going on? The last thing Alina remembered before waking from her nap here, was sitting in the floor in this very room but decorated the same way her parents had left it, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and her prescription of Xanax in the other.