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Then - September 9 2012

I tried to open my eyes but all I could feel was pain. Pain in my abdomen, pain in my hands, and pain in my chest, right where my heart should be. I felt like something or someone that meant something to me had been lost. That someone I loved very much was absent. But my mind couldn't process thoughts fast enough to work out what.

My mind felt like it had been fed through a shredder more times than I cared to remember. It was sore, but in a different way from my hands, my stomach, my chest. It was more like I had had my head smashed while my brain was being shredded. But I realised I didn't mind. I felt like I deserved the pain. 

And, from deep in my subconscience I could hear a voice telling me these things. That I deserved it. That I deserved everything that was happening to me. Because I had done something very, very bad. To someone who meant an awful lot to me. And I needed to pay for it. And I realised I was fine with this. Because, I realised, I agreed with them. I had done wrong. And now I was paying the price.

As I lay there in the dark, still trying to open my eyes, I realised I could hear more voices than the one which was telling me I deserved this. I could here a worried voice telling me to wake up. Wake up. Please. They sounded like they were about to have a panic attack. I could almost see her eyes, brimming with fear. Bright green eyes staring into my closed face. Bu t I wasn't about to wake up for this person. I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to have to remember ever again.

But on the edges of my mind  I could feel the memory coming back. Hear the screaming, smell the fear.

The panicer had now moved on to stroking my hand. It was intensely painful. She kept hitting the sore spots. And I tried so hard to pull away. I mustered up all of my energy. But it was no use. My hand still sat at my side where I could feel it. Not moving. And the panicer was still stroking it, moving in circles. And my hand was still aching like it had been sliced open in several different places. The panicer was making it feel like it had salt in it too.

Someone had joined the panicer now. They had a much more soothing voice, like they were trying to sooth the panicer. I hoped it would make the panicer leave my hand alone. I hoped it would make the panicer calm down and stop panicking. Lucky for me it did. Unluckily for me, as soon as the panicer left, the soother started speaking to me. And the soother sounded mildly angry. 

Joanna, the soother said to me, and I had the feeling that this was supposed to mean something to me. But it didn't. So I just lay there. But the soother persisted. Jo, the soother said. You have to listen to me. Wake up, Jo. Mum is going to panic and die if you don't wake up. She's not going to make it if you don't wake up. Please Jo. Wake up.

I considered the soothers words. Then decided to reject them.

So I lay still in my blanket of pain. There wasn't much else I could do after all. My shredded brain refused to process any other thoughts, refused to let me do anything but lie there and endure the pain. The pain that my shredded brain was telling me I deserved.

So there I was, just lying there, concentrating on the pain, making it worse than it already was, making me want to curl up in pain, clutching my throbbing stomach. And then I lifted up my hands to my face.

They were covered in blood.

I was thrown full pelt into a memory, the very one I had been trying to forget. I tried to push away the thought of clutching my throbbing stomach and looking at my hands and seeing the blood there. But the harder I tried to push it, the more the blood on my hands seemed to jump out at me, staining my entire vision an iron red, a crimson so bright that I thought my eyes were the ones bleeding. And just as I thought the sea of red was going to grab me with red hands and take me away on a red boat to the other side, to the side where I could see a dark man with even darker, eyes the shade of despair no-one ever wanted to see, someone started talking to me.

And it wasn't the soother. Or the panicer.

"Hello, Joanna," said the voice, a voice so cold I could feel frosticles forming at the edges of my mind. A voice so cold I could feel gusts of wind coming through the room of my mind and nearly knocking me over. A voice so cold I thought it at first belonged to a frost giant from the beginning of time. A voice so cold it sounded like it had been dead for some time.

In my mind I turned around, the soother and the panicer momentarily forgotten, the pain virtually gone; it had been numbed by the extreme cold.

And there, standing before me, was someone that made all the memories I had been trying to suppress come flooding back in one huge torrent, the strong pull of their icy current threatening to pull me under.

Standing before me was a person I thought I was never going to see again. A person with eyes so dead and cold I could hardly believe they had been ever been alive. Although I knew for a fact that they had once been alive.

Because the person standing before me was someone I knew very well.

Amber.

The waves of hatred I could feel coming off her were so strong even I could feel them through my poor, mangled brain.  She seemed to be staring at me like I was less than a micro-organism at the bottom of the food chain. Like she would have no problem with murdering me right there. Confused, I tried to go to her, the avatar of me in my mind having no problem moving unlike my real body which try as I might, I could not move.

"Amber," I tried to say, but the words would not come, and as I tried to move forward she held up a hand, her eyes blazing with the icy, dead hatred. I wnated to cry. Where had the Amber I had known and loved gone? This sure as hell was not her.

Then as if she could read my mind, she answered my question. "She's gone, Joanna," she said, her voice as cold as her eyes. "She died." I stared blankly at her, feeling even more confused and likely to cry than ever. She tilted her head slightly to the side and a smirk crept across her face, even more dead than her icy eyes and her monotonous voice.

"Oh, little Jo wants to cry," she mocked me. I nearly did start crying then. I tried to convince myself that it was all in my head, it was just a dream, or some sort of twisted version of a dream. But the Amber standing in front of me was so real, despite the deadness in her. She was tainting the Amber I held in my memory, laughing, beautiful Amber, so full of life. Not dead, never dead.

Dead Amber in front of me, still able to read my mind, started talking to me again. "But that's just it, Jo,"  she said, moving towards me in disjointed movements. It was horrific, but I couldn't tear my eyes from her, frozen in place by her terrible iciness. "Your refusing to accept what really happened." As she continued to advance towrads me I could feel the memories getting ready to crash over me in huge freezing wave. "You won't see what you did because your afraid of it."  I coud feel the waves nearly upon me. She continued to advance on me, finally stopping just in front of me. She leaned in towards me. "You can't believe that I'm dead."

The wave finally crashed over my head, rushing me away in a thundering, icy mass of midnight black and blood red. I started screaming. I didn't want to remember. She couldn't make me remember.

But she could, and all I could do was lay there as I was washed away on a sea of blood red memories I wished I didn't have.

And she stood there, a not-so-silent figure in my mind, laughing