A woman rushes forward and wraps her arms around me like a snake about to consume its meal. It hurts. I think she might never let me go. She smells like strange flowers and I sneeze. Eventually she draws back enough to look at me.
I have seen her face before. I go through all the faces of the family, but she is not one of them. She is too pale and her hair is smooth like mine used to be. She doesn’t have the family’s dark eyes. She looks like an older version of the me I see when I look in the lake. Then it falls into place.
“Mum?” I say.
I’ve lost Wu and my family.
It takes a long time to reconnect with my own world. I’m disorientated, as though this is the dream. I’ve lost part of myself in the past. Mum tells me she arrived home in the morning after my birthday and hadn’t been able
