It was a dream.
Or perhaps more accurately, it simply felt like a dream. I had no sense of my own body, and my mind felt as if it were afloat. I was sitting in a chair at the table in the garden, but everything was in black-and-white. The wind blew soundlessly through the trees.
Ordinarily, when I sat outside, somebody made me tea, and I found myself wondering why this was not the case today. At that very instant, a cup of tea was poured and placed before me. Stranger still, outside of where my teacup was placed, the table was covered entirely in books.
Even stranger still was the realization that I was not alone.
“Ern? What are you doing?” I asked.
She was sitting opposite me. Her curly hair was worn down, and she wore the sort of dress she usually would have avoided like the plague. Ern was the type who went for mobility over style, and this was not that. And yet, it was stunning. So beautiful, in fact, that it felt rude to ask her if she was uncomfortable.
But Ern offered nothing in the way of any response to my question. She pored through one of the books on the table as if she hadn’t heard my voice at all. Something about it just felt...off.
“That is you, right...?” I asked. “Ern?”
She looked like the Ern I knew, but I felt like she was something different. But even after another question, her eyes continued to take in the words in her book, and she gave no sign that she would ever look up from her work to acknowledge me.
It was only as I made to stand from my chair—rattling my teacup in the process—that she finally looked up. There was surprise on her face, and it dawned on me then that she hadn’t been ignoring me at all—she simply hadn’t realized I was there at all.
She was Ern, but she was not Ern. She was the same, but she was different. I couldn’t shake how odd it felt, and the environment did nothing to help.
“$B5.J}$,%@%&s%m!<%,” she said.
I couldn’t understand any of it, and if I hadn’t seen her actually pronouncing it all, I wouldn’t have even thought it was a language. I didn’t know how to respond, and Ern’s brow furrowed. She looked as confused as I did. If we couldn’t understand the words we were both speaking, how were we supposed to communicate at all?
“%m!<%I@h.”
Ern sighed and returned to her book. She did not look up again, and so I simply sat back down. Time passed. I’m not sure how much, but it was as I began to wonder about it that I stirred from what felt like a very deep sleep.
I was hot. Sweat poured from my body. I felt icky and damp.
I hate how familiar this sensation has become, I really do...
I stared lazily up at the ceiling. My thoughts swirled like disparate leaves caught on the wind. My body was dull and sluggish, but also as if I was past the worst that this fever had to offer. I closed my eyes again. I hated how prone I was to falling ill. I couldn’t quite make sense of things. My body felt like it weighed a ton. I’d been tired before, but not like this—not to the point that even lifting a finger felt like a struggle.
When I next opened my eyes, I took in my surroundings. I was in my room, alone. Charlot was sitting at the corner of the bed, looking at me. She must have been sleeping too, because she let out a big yawn and stretched before walking over to rub her head and nose against me. It was the most adorable thing ever.
My throat was parched, and I found myself reaching out in search of a pitcher or glass. My hair fell upon my shoulder, which was entirely natural, given that it wasn’t tied behind my head, but all the same, I froze when I saw it. It was not at all what I was expecting.
At first, I thought it was an illusion, or that I was hallucinating. But no matter what I did, my hair remained the same. I was certain that there was nothing wrong with my eyes, so it couldn’t have been that. I crawled out of bed and stood on unsteady feet. Each step I took to the mirror was awkward and clumsy, like that of a newly born deer calf.
“What the heck...?” I uttered.
In my reflection stood a girl with white hair. I knew every part of her like the back of my hand—I mean, she was me—but it was as if there were some sort of bug in the visual programming. I took my hair in my hand, I lifted it above my head, I looked at it from as many different angles as I could, but it remained steadfastly white.
My once brown hair—so dark it was almost black—had gone completely white. I leaned in closer to the mirror to get a clearer look at my face and found that my eyebrows were white down to their roots. I felt like an elderly woman, except that my hair still retained its youthful sheen. It was as if the color had simply drained from it.
It wasn’t long, however, before my fever and fatigue caught up with my shock. I felt suddenly exhausted and remembered how thirsty I was. I was so very, very tired. Even walking like a deer calf felt almost beyond me.
“Somebody... Water...” I rasped.
Unfortunately, it felt far more likely that I would plunge once again into sleep before getting the water I so craved. But just as the sandman was set to send me once more into the land of dreams, the door opened.
“I’m so sorry,” came a young man’s voice, “We’re simply all out of helping hands. All of the aides and servants are out at the moment.”
“Don’t mention it,” said a woman, entering with him. “We’re neighbors, and that means helping one another in times of need. Leave the nursing to me.”