Eyes wide, breathing haphazard, perspiration mixed with blood trickled, wading down the exasperated expression on Aerith’s visage. Stood in centre of an unkempt room, an ocean tossed about with strewn sticky notes, tossed over bookshelves and ravaged clothing, was the girl set stoned in clocked in realisation, woven with shock and a torrent of over flooding thoughts.

Time had tired arms of clocks, stepping cautiously over the room’s silence. The atmosphere suffocated reality, imprisoning Aerith’s still body. Despite the still room, the solitude but tossed turbulent, undulating in currents lined by her thoughts. ‘Was this me? This, this place. It was, wasn’t it? How? But why? Why can’t I remember anything?’

Clenched, scarred fists tightened and the frozen cyclone of the room, secluded from outside, loosened from its grip, and amidst Aerith’s spinning head, she fell limp. Unknowing of herself, her surroundings and of any past events, only her thoughts echoed in the still storm of suffocating tides, lashing at her head and ravaging a pain that but only tensed in silence. Aerith’s breathing hastened and along, her eyelids held her only momentary escape from the cell.

The room, hazened in overlapping vision, soon dimmed down into a fragmented black, lustred and thumping from all the chaos, catastrophic in her head. Anything to do with now didn’t matter anymore. Not for Aerith’s heart. Yet her head echoed through its own turbulence in urgence, aware of the qualm she was welcoming in each seeping sand granule. But, of course, the qualm can wait.