A/N: Okay, so this is my first story and I'm a little unsure. I hope everyone likes it so far and I will try and be a goddess with updating, but ya know how it is....Please leave feedback and let me know what I can do to help make my readers happy!
"Cause a Mississippi girl don't change her ways..."
~ Faith Hill
Every time I try and remember all I can come up with are flickers: The way it smelled on a spring morning about five minutes before it rained—Noon in midsummer when the air was so moist with humidity it felt like you could cut it with a knife and the scent of gardenias hung so thick it was as if you couldn't breathe—The gray of the Gulf in the winter and the unchanging green of the leaves on the hundred year old live oaks.
The Change opens the mind up so fully that I've been told to try and remember anything from Before is like looking at grainy, black and white, silent films. One of my sisters allowed her anger to help hold on to her memories; another used her love. My brothers don't seem to care that they lost a part of their past—they hang on to the basic structure their human lives held (name, birthplace, etc.) but have allowed other parts to fade with the years. My love knows his own story as he knows how to perfectly play my body and read my emotions. He remembered his mortal life in order to survive his immortal one. My parents, too, keep their own histories almost as the cherished children they could never physically create and nourish them as their caring and compassionate natures insist they do with anything showing a hint of vulnerability. But no matter the result, my family made the choice to keep or release the more human portions of their existence. I never had a chance to decide. My mind was already so broken that the flickers are all I have left.
But are they all I have left? In torturing Bella, a monster gave me something that I could never have discovered on my own: a clue. Mary Alice Brandon. Biloxi, Mississippi. A sister. A niece. A past.
Can I go back there; should I? I love my life, what it is, but I don't want to have a big blank in my head where there should be something else. I used to be someone else, something else. I want to know who that was and why I've come to be who I am. How that any different from what others have been trying to do for eons? Funnily enough, I actually have the time to figure it out.
Please leave some feedback so I can get the courage to continue! Thanks!