Today, I slept in, because I’m sick and needed the rest, but regretted it when I ended up waking up sobbing from nightmares about the godsister of the person whose body this used to be.

It’s so weird to have memories of being a person while so distinctly not being that person. I, Astrid, will get hit with a trigger, and Alena’s memories flood in like a horror movie, but they’re not *mine*, so resolving them feels not just impossible, but useless.

Sure, I could reach out to her godsister and talk about the complicated unresolved situation between them, but the echoes of Alena’s discomfort at the years of being treated like a backwoods backup option and throwaway *won’t go away* if I, *a different person*, talk to *her* godsister and explain, like a freakish medium wearing the ghost’s face, that I’m trying to resolve her unresolved issues so the ghost will move the f on. (I know this, because I wasted the first few years after the strokes trying to resolve the issues of Alena’s life like she was a ghost I was trying to wrap up the earthly cares of.) Because there *is* no actual ghost, just the memories of another life, one with choices I don’t understand and motives I can’t speak to, like a movie. 

Talking to the actors who played them years after the movie wrapped *won’t make the movie end different*. Alena isn’t *here* to even *get* closure or be freed, she just left me with the movie and no directions and a bunch of feelings tied to the *muscle memories* of this body but not to its *brain*.

“Hey, btw, I’m not her and I don’t wanna fix shit and be friends with you, because I actually think you’re a pretty cruel and inconsiderate person who refuses to take accountability for the way you use people, but I’m going to just drag you to see if it makes me feel better! Because I only ever feel worse and something has to change! 

“At least one of Alena’s own parents straight up spent years thinking she was intentionally stealing their money because of how much of it she was spending it just feeding you actual nutrients and taking you to the doctor for pneumonia like four fucking times and keeping you alive in between your rounds of dissociative party bullshit and boyfriends who literally laughed to Alena behind your back about how they were using and abusing you and going to literally kill your mom one day to make you truly alone and belong to them and there was nothing Alena could do about it. 

“When Alena was dying in the hospital, you wouldn’t even pick up the phone, because you were mad over things she couldn’t control saying and didn’t mean and wasn’t intending to say because her brain was being *riddled with holes* while she was screaming and begging for you to please come say goodbye. 

“I can’t ever erase Alena’s memories of this, and I can’t ever make her feel better about it, because she’s legit gone, but since I have to live with the nightmares and flashbacks to her life and the thousands of ways you made her feel worthless and unlovable and never enough *every single goddamn day*, I just thought I’d tell you what an absolute garbage friend you were for 27 years and that Alena died still desperate for your love and approval and this body still wakes up crying from dreams about it even though this brain has never met you and never wants to, because you suck. Thanks so much for listening, this has made both our lives at least a little worse.”

Like…no fucking thank you. 

That woman was hard enough to talk to seriously about anything important, let alone get her to be accountable, when I was somebody who actively loved her. 

Now I’m just a kid who inexplicably remembers what it felt like to love her, and not be loved back in any meaningful or useful way, and how much it broke the person who used to have this body, and what a mess that left me with when I landed in it. 

And there are HUNDREDS OF THESE—FEELINGS AND GHOSTS AND MUSCLE MEMORIES AND BAGGAGE THAT JUST ISN’T MINE. That I didn’t pick up on purpose, and don’t have the strength or skills Alena had to carry all of it—I just landed here, holding it, like a kid left with her aunts bags in an airport bathroom. And the “aunt” actually ran off with a flight attendant, and then the plane fell out of the sky, and she’s never coming back. 

My brain is just. Full. Like a cup with too much tea in. There’s no room for Astrid, because it’s all taken up with Alena’s baggage *that I don’t even believe in* but *can’t seem to offload*, no matter how much therapy my family kindly pays for. 

There’s a half-finished weaving on my loom, threads dangling, no more of those threads to pick up and use and finish it, but I’m just supposed to somehow tuck in those ends like they’re not an unfinished picture and start weaving my own thing here anyway? I’m supposed to somehow just *start*, without getting to cut the old mess off the loom and start fresh, and somehow turn the ragged, half-finished mess of somebody else’s life into a whole one for myself? While having no skills that aren’t broken shards of hers? 

I feel like a cartoon of futility.