She smiles with my mouth and laughs with my voice, ringing through the springtime air. I am cloaked by the velvet darkness of shadow, but assorted trees cast a dappled light across her face. My face.

I don’t think she knows I am here. I watch, intrigued.

For though externally we are identical, this stranger is not me and I am not her. She smiles and laugh, just because this mucky excuse for a park, littered with smashed beer bottles and cigarette butts, is beautiful in her rose tinted gaze; and yet I rarely leave the safe confinements of my abode, for terror of the outdoors world. Sunlight burned my skin. Conversation pickled my brain.

She the first reason I had ventured outside in over a year, because she was me, but better, more positive and cheerful. She made me realise what I could be.

But I shrivelled