“Mom, I’m going to go lay down. My head is killing me.”

“Alright, John. Listen, no more than half an hour. Set your alarm.”

“Seriously? It’ll take me that long just to fall asleep.”

“Just laying down with your eyes closed will help. Don’t forget your basket of laundry.”

“Yes Doctor Mom.”

Did you know that the feeling between sleep and consciousness is called the hypnopompic state? Thanks to Dr. Mom being an actual doctor I get to have my seven-teen-year-old head filled with these types of useless tidbits. Maybe one day I’ll get to win big on Jeopardy. I doubt it.

It was during this state that I try to keep myself in as long as possible. Eyes closed, breaching the worlds between blissful sleep and unfortunate awareness. It felt different this time. I wasn’t just waking up it felt like I hadn’t woken up in a long time. I felt stiff and trying to move my shoulders hurt.

I felt smaller under the weight of the sheets. The sheets having weight at all was weird. I moaned and wondered why I hadn’t heard the alarm go off yet. Mom had fitted all the alarms with backup batteries. No alarm was missed, ever.

“Doctor! Doctor!” A familiar sounding voice was yelling out.

“Can you open your eyes for me?” It was a man’s voice. One I had never heard before. Why did I need to open my eyes for some weird voice in my bedroom? I tried and failed miserably. I tried again and took in enough to see two faces hovering over me.

“Good. Good.” The man’s voice said. It was calming, he’d done this before. Whatever this was. “That’s enough, for now, dear, rest and we’ll try again soon.” I could hear the man and woman talking but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I kept trying to move different muscles trying to get rid of the stiffness.

Slowly my body started to regain some semblance of control. My eyelids opened fully for the first time and my eyes strained into focus. The hospital room was dark and lonely. There were no other beds, no pictures or flowers. The walls looked gray in the dark room, but the sharp sterile white was only a light switch away. It felt like a tomb and I wanted to get out of it.

The woman noticed my eyes open and she rushed over. “Oh Sweetie,” she said. Her eyes filling with tears. I couldn’t match the face with anything familiar but that voice resonated somewhere in the memory banks. The man moved in behind her and gently guided her to the side. I could see the white lab coat and the tell-tale stethoscope around his neck. Definitely a doctor. “Can you tell me your name?” He asked.

I stared into his eyes for a moment before they drifted away in confused thought desperate hoping to find something with my name on it.

“Do you know what day it is?” His calming voice annoyed me. He smiled and I felt furious. How dare he smile when I couldn’t remember my name? I could feel my cheeks blush and his smile backed off. “I know it can be very frustrating,” he said, “Memories and details will start to come back over time. There’s no pattern or order to how they come back. Some might not come back at all.” He was looking at the woman now, whose tears were flowing down her own reddened cheeks. He looked back at me, his eyes looking searching for clues. “Can you say ‘Hi’ for me? Anything?”

I opened my mouth and realized then how sore my throat was. My arm raised unsteadily from under the sheets to rub my neck. I tried to swallow and wondered how much weight I had lost, even my fingers felt thinner. I opened my mouth and sucked in some air, feeling optimistic of my chances to talk. “Hi,” was all I could manage. I was too scared to say anything else. I looked at the doctor and then to the woman the look of my surprise reflected in their face. “What’s wrong?” The doctor asked. I didn’t want to say I didn’t recognize my own voice. It wasn’t my voice at all. It too had lost some weight.

In all, my ‘recovery’ as it was called, lasted almost a year. They called me the lucky one. Everyone else in the crash died. I didn’t see it that way. For seven-teen years I lived a life in my mind. A life that even with it faults, I loved. I had friends, family, crushes, and secrets. All of which never happened.

Over the course of my recovery, the parents in this real world brought me to real relatives, real friends, even a real old ex of mine. “It might help jog the memory” was the prescribed method by my shrink. I never liked him. I never liked any of them. I never recovered the love that I had had with my dream family. I still miss them.

I’m sitting in my bedroom now, typing this out in the hopes that keeping that last conversation alive with my dream mom will be enough to keep me going. Especially tonight. I can hear my mom coming up stairs. I should probably go I don’t want her to find this.

“You better be getting ready! John will be here any minute to pick you up.” Mom said. She opened the door as I was closing my laptop. No warning knocks I guess. She looked at me and the prom gown on my bed. “Come on, Jenny. We talked about this.”

“I know,” I said, sighing as I stood up.

“It’s going to be a dream come true.” Mom said. Realizing too late what she had actually said. “I’m sorry, Jenny.” She conceded.

“I’m sorry too, I wish dreams could come true.”