This one was so awful that I wake up shaking with my mouth open in a wide-mouthed grimace because I’m unable to scream. I feel his arms tucking around me as he whispers shhhh into my ear.

What this time, baby?

Another fire, I gasp. And two others.

Who was it? Did you see them this time?

A man and a woman, Sammy. Dead. Their eyes were lifeless, their faces burned. They were wrapped all around each other, intertwined like we are now. They were dead, but then the woman reached out to me, made a grab for my hand. I looked into her eyes, and they were mine.

What do you mean, made a grab for you?

My wrist. But I was very small, just a little girl. Her fingers broke off where they touched me, crumbled to dust. I ran to a dark space under a cupboard and hid.

How old? He pets my hair.

Eight, maybe. Nine. Sammy, I think they were my parents. I think they didn’t want me to leave.

No, baby. You and me, we don’t have families.

Not anymore, you mean.

No. Never. That’s why you can’t remember anything before me. You’ve always belonged to me.

Then why do I dream these things? Who are these people? Who is that girl? I challenge him because something in me says I know different.

Was she there, too? His tone is sharp.

No! I say. Just the other times. The times I’ve told you about.

OK, he says soothingly. Back to bed, mija. Forget all that. Soon he is snoozing.

But forgetting has always been my trouble. I don’t want to forget; I want to cling to these memories and dreams, which come nearly every evening now, much more often than I admit to Sammy. Something in me makes me hold back from him. They’re more real to me when he can’t just explain them away. They’re more real than anything I’ve ever known. Sometimes, and then it scares me, they’re more familiar to me than Sammy.

I don’t know Sammy all the time anymore. I look at him sometimes and I see this foreign person, this being other than myself. He didn’t used to be a separate being. He was as much of me as my arms and legs. Tearing him away, I used to imagine, would cause too much bleeding for me to stay alive. Now I think I could stay alive. But I wouldn’t want to. I miss feeling sewn together, and the times I don’t feel it I know I am more alone than anyone else in the universe. So I hold on to him as tight as I can. Even so, the more I realize I could maybe survive without him, the more I turn toward these memory-gifts. And the more memories I invite in, the more my headaches improve; the pain in my head is a barrier that’s crumbling, leaving me freer than before.

These changes tug at my world and make me fight with Sam and make things bad between us, and the dynamic shifts every time just slightly and I fight to get it back but it’s so elusive. How could things have once been so perfect? I see the world now in all colors and shades of darkness and light, and the darkness mixes with the light until it’s indiscernible, where before the only dark was outside our home and the only light within. Something awful has happened to change me. And with it came the girl with the black hair and these people, my parents, and they’re poking their way into our home and my head. Nothing is safe from my nightmares. I am not safe; I don’t know what is real and what is imagined. Sammy is my only voice of reason, but sometimes the darkness takes him away, too, and then I have only myself. I can feel a gap opening between Sam and me like when Amanda was around, but this one has nothing to do with jealousy. I will stop telling Sam about my dreams. I’ll figure it out on my own.