Prologue

The sun is steadily shining but it's evening. It's August. Elise isn't sure why she knows. Looks like August. She's lying down.

The shore is rocky and the ocean sloshes against the shore like pool water in a bucket. The air is warm and sticky and Elise feels lighter, somehow, and looks over her own body because of the sensation. Her arm is still slinged but she's younger, she's fourteen maybe, thirteen. Her heart swells wildly for a moment in her chest upon the realization. She feels very happy and free and weightless. The rocks are digging into her back but instead of hurting they remind her of sensation. They feel good, real good. There's no one she can see or hear which doesn't bother her, why, she thinks, because she remembers oddly at that moment that she likes to hide in a crowd. 

And then something materializes from deep out in the ocean, starting as a formless black glob and moving elegantly and and slowly but also swiftly, as if Elise had pressed the fast forward button in the middle of a movie. The form reaches the shoreline seemingly as soon as it had appeared and Elise recognizes it as the alien she had fallen in love with so many years ago. Or maybe, here in her young body, merely weeks or months in the past or even the future. She hates the face but feels only an overwhelming wave of nothingness as their eyes meet. It turns away.

The view freezes for a few seconds, and Elise wishes it would forever, but the moment turns into a wavy pink mirage and then the alien is gone and the shore is gone and the sweet sun is gone and the whole scene is blinked into a pepto bismol still-shot. 

Elise's eyes opened and starchy light from the nearby lamp immediately gave her a dull morning headache. 

"What... the f**k..." 

She felt her face to grasp reality once again, which she had never done after waking from a dream before. The sturdiness of her vision left her confused, as if she had just crossed from one reality into the next. When you dreamt there were no walls or ceilings, no concrete or constant objects, only thoughts that faded into and out of vision upon requirement. She could have sworn that she had been standing in real shoes and watching a scene play out bound by the limits of reality and stream of time. Even her arm had been broken in the dream. Two weeks ago she had tried to wrench open an airlock door in attempt to throw herself into space. Unfortunately she hadn't been able to carry through with the plan, but her resulted shattered arm felt like nirvana and she had refused first aid to thrive off the pain for the following days. It had eventually been wrangled into a sling which never made close to any appearance in her dreams until now. Was that even a dream? Or a rich hallucination she had traveled through right in her own bed? Maybe so. Elise knew she was going crazy. She was so fucked in the head she definitely shouldn't have been pondering the technicalities of thoughts or visions or whatevers that went on while she was conscious or asleep or whatever or whatever.

Elise briefly contemplated breaking her right arm as well. She then got out of bed and moved across the hall to get breakfast.

The pancakes tasted good, admittedly, probably because the cook staff had prepared the food and not her. She had been banned from the stove multiple times, and finally permanently. It was an easy way to burn herself or melt various household objects; both of which she did plenty of, especially the latter. Her microwave and oven had been taken away as well. Her apartment was bare in the way of appliances but cluttered with various newspapers, plush animals and receipts otherwise. 

Elise cut into the dough with a plastic fork and thought of her mother for the hundredth time that week. She had been here for years, but could never let go of the dull aching separation had left her with. She felt as if she were still attached to an umbilical cord stretched out thousands and thousands and millions of miles to her mother's warm skin. She could feel her stomach ache with the cord's weary pull as the spacecraft inched further and further away. Her mother's warm warm skin. Elise began to cry again but could not produce physical tears. She wanted to, desperately, maybe that was the one thing the doctors could do for her, though shallowly inside she knew she had not tear duct deficiency but depression. She knew that staying alive until the ship reached Earth again would mean stitching her brittle body back together over and over and over again through thousands of years, but hoped they might pass a hot bright star much sooner. A little warmth might serve well to get her serotonin flowing. 

Elise realized she had been staring at the starch blue wall for the past five minutes and began to shovel the rest of her breakfast into her mouth. Elise felt hungry yet not ravenous, which struck her as another oddity, as her appetite tended to fluctuate wildly any normal day. She rose from her seat once she had finished and ventured across to her bedroom to tend to her calender. She abandoned her dishes at the table; the motivation to wash them, or anything really, would come someday. 

JUNE was at the top the grid of x-ed out days- she scribbled out the 30th with bleached pink of a fading red sharpie and turned the month over. Van Lee greeted her on the other side with JULY in grass green and the sight made her feel rekindled.

Author's Note

I know this is very fast paced, short, and confusing. It's the prologue, the chapters will make far more sense!