Her first memory was of floating in a sea of white. When she awoke, she blinked groggily before
looking around at an impenetrable mass of swirling mist. The air chilled her skin but the cold didn’t
seem to bother her, even though she wore only a thin cotton dress, pink with
white flowers around the knee-length hem.
She was a young woman, her figure
slim but showing the curves she would grow into. Her
hair, a soft brown color tumbled over her shoulders in wavy curls exaggerated
by the moisture in the air. She blinked
slowly and looked around, her gray-blue eyes wide with fear.
As she bobbed slowly in the still air, she tried to remember
how she got here, but there was nothing. She didn’t know her
name. She had no recollection of her parents or if she had any
siblings. She couldn’t picture a house or any other place she might have
lived. She didn’t remember having any hobbies or
friends. She knew that a home and a family existed, but there was
only empty space filling the place where those memories should be, just like
the mists surrounding her.
Letting out a startled cry, she suddenly realized that she
was hovering in mid-air. There was
nothing solid beneath her and when she looked down, she felt sudden lurching
sensation and began to fall. A
frightened scream burst from her chest as she flailed her arms uselessly while
plummeting through the clouds. “NO!” she
shouted, her voice cracking with fear.
Almost as quickly as it began, her fall stopped and she
began to hover again. Chest heaving, she looked around and trailed her
long, thin fingers through the mist. She tilted her head to look upward
and thought to herself, “up”. Immediately, she floated upwards.
With another thought, she banked left and right, weaving through the air as
gracefully as a bird. She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms
over her head as she floated through the air. It felt like swimming but
without any sensation of pressure or weight.
The feeling of flying made her stomach flutter with
excitement but she couldn’t fight the dread that sat in her chest like a lead
weight. M The world around her was
silent and formless. She was alone and
lost in her troubled thoughts:
Who am I?
What is this place?
What happened to me?
Where is everyone else?
The questions kept forming in her
mind but there were no answers until one word flowed through her min, a name. With a quiet sigh, she said softly,
“Dina. My name is Dina.” She looked down at the cotton dress she wore
and she came to another realization. “I
like flowers and the color pink.” Looking
around again at the swirling mists surrounding her, she added, “And I can fly.”
For now, that was enough.
