Disclaimer:  Not mine.  Though I wouldn't mind if they were.

Prologue

She really couldn't remember a lot about her past.  She remembered the town in which she grew up, her parents and family--a little.  It was all in bits and pieces, though.  The harder she tried to remember, the more frustrated she became, and so she gave up on trying to remember all the bits and pieces a long time ago.  Sure, it was hard not to have a solid past, or to remember old acquaintances, but it would be harder not to live in the present, or concentrate on her future.

Her parents had told her that the memory lapses began about six months after her high school graduation, with apparently no cause at all.  She would fall into comatose sleeps that would last well over fourteen hours; they said that they could hear her having nightmares, but trying to wake her had been useless.  She'd been to doctors, psychologists, sleep specialists, parapsychologists, members of the clergy--and no one had any excuses for her condition.  Her parents had fretted continually as her memory continued to wane after each episode of deep sleep.  This went on for nearly four months, and then--it had stopped.  At least, that's what her parents said.  She had no memory of that whatsoever.

What she did remember was where life picked up after that.  Her parents worked hard with her to help her reclaim memories that they felt would be of importance to her--her junior and senior proms, her graduation, her friends, especially those who had moved on...

Those memories had been the hardest to reclaim.  Her whole senior year at Robert E. Lee High was a blur to her.  And what little she could remember made no sense...always flashes, quick and brilliant, like snapshots in time...names and faces that she was somehow sure of: Elena, bright and beautiful, like a candle flame, and Meredith, strong and graceful, so mature for her age...and Matt, good-looking and wholesome, and then--

She could never quite remember anyone else, no matter how hard her parents tried to help her.  She was sure there were others who had been important to her, so very, very important...but the names, the faces, they were gone, perhaps forever, and more than anything else, that lost memory was what troubled her the most.  It flitted in and out, and she could imagine words to describe it...dark, powerful, frightening, and yet, somehow, she felt comforted by its presence hovering at the edge of her consciousness.  Even though it tormented her that she could never quite figure out what it was her unconscious wanted her to remember, she knew she's be very sad if some small fragment--even if it was just a feeling--wasn't there at all.

At least then, she hoped that someday it would all come back to her. She just had no clue when someday would be.