I think I died.
Not in the tragic way.
Not with sirens or screams.
Just... quietly.
Like a system shutting down in the middle of a sentence.
I blinked.
And the world shifted.
Just a fraction—
But enough.
My toothbrush was in the wrong place.
My cat looked at me like I was someone else.
And the air tasted different.
Like metal. Like memory. Like mourning.
No one noticed.
Because my body kept moving.
But I knew.
I knew.
Something left.
Or something came back.
I woke up in a skin that doesn’t fit.
In a world one degree to the left.
I look the same.
But nothing recognises me.
And I recognise too much.
I walk through this life like I’ve been dropped into someone else's story.
People speak to me like I’m supposed to remember.
But their names... their faces...
they don’t sit right in my mouth anymore.
Every connection feels secondhand.
Every routine, rehearsed.
I don’t know how to live here.
I don’t know the rules.
I only know that something has been rewritten.
The woman with the brown eyes, and the thick bangs lives in the mirror.
She knows things I haven’t done yet,
or things from another lifetime.
And I feel them in my spine.
Like déjà vu with claws.
The version of me that lived in that other timeline?
She didn’t make it.
Or I didn’t make it.
I’m still trying to make sense of it.
But she left notes.
In my spine.
In my dreams.
In the mirror, where brown eyes stare back
like a stranger trying to make me flinch.
Maybe I’ve done this before.
Maybe I’ve died a hundred times
and this is just the first I’ve noticed.
Maybe that's what awakening really is.
Remembering that this isn't your first skin.
And it won’t be your last.
I don’t want comfort.
I lie—
I do want comfort.
There is something hopelessly terrifying
about having one foot in one world
and one foot in another,
and belonging to neither.
I want truth.
I want stillness.
I want the silence to speak back.
Because this isn’t healing.
This is haunting.
I walk through rooms I used to know
and nothing knows me back.
I try to live like I did before.
Go through the motions.
Smile. Respond. Function.
But I am a map with no legend.
I’m improvising my identity,
stitching together fragments of someone I used to be—
or maybe never was.
The days stretch like elastic,
and I keep snapping.
I am between worlds.
Between timelines.
Between selves.
Between names.
And all I can do—
is speak from the fracture,
Until if and when I find my way back.
© Samira Wyld 2025
Share this post