2. Silence

Nothing is familiar.

This morning I watched him pack up the things that he had brought for me in the suitcase that he had carried them in.  I watched frozen by the window, knowing that when he had completed his task I would be forced to leave with him. Each item I had touched I felt him waiting for a glimmer of a memory, any recognition that I remembered them as my things. My things... It feels ludicrous to call them that when, to me, I have never seen them in my life.

We haven't spoken other than the perfunctory greetings and enquiries as to my health. Did we have great conversations? Did we laugh together? I feel the strain of silence and the intrusion of his person in the room.

This is my husband. This tall man with his blonde hair and serious expression. Each day he comes wearing a suit, the jacket missing but the waistcoat always fitted and fastened. I have no idea of his profession, why he is always dressed so smartly. I don't know him! I want to scream it through the window and down to the street below.

But I can't... it would break the silence.

Lost in thought I jumped when he touched my arm. Touched me for the first time, startling us both. Had I always felt electricity at his touch or was what I felt merely confusion mixed with the fear of my new circumstances? Had his eyes always been so blue as they held my own?

That first touch had been hours ago and he had gone out of his way to avoid repeating it since. The hours had been spent travelling, him driving, while I dosed and contemplated the trip to the highlands of Scotland when I had lived my whole life at the other end of the British Isle.

As we neared our destination I hid in the pretense of sleep until I was forced to open my eyes at his words.

"Ally... we're home."

Home.

1. Waking Up

Amnesia.

They say that is what I have, along with the broken bones and permanent headache... Amnesia. Apparently, when my coach hit the tarmac the wrong way up my head hit something in turn. Out of the thirty four passengers only nineteen survived. I am one of the lucky ones.

But I don't feel lucky.

I am grateful to be alive but I have woken up into a life I do not know, in a year my mind has not reached and with people making claims on me when I do not recall their faces.

I know who I am or rather I know who I was but there is a gap, eight years are merely blackness.

Eight years, three of them spent married to a man who is currently a stranger. The stranger who at this moment sits in this room of cleaniness and monitors and can barely look in my direction as when our eyes meet all he gets in return is an expression of weariness.

I close my eyes, trying to delay the moment when they deem me fit to leave and recover at home.

Home. With a stranger. Without myself for protection...