I opened my eyes and saw darkness.

“Okay, it’s not funny, whoever turned off the lights. You can stop it now!”

I shuffled my feet in the dark and felt carpet.

“The hallway doesn’t have carpet,” I said to myself, “where am I now?”

I reached out and swiped my hands through the air hoping to find a light switch before tripping over anything. I smacked my hand against a wall and walked along it all the way to what felt like several light switches, well, more like sliders. My fingers moved two of the sliders up to reveal I was, once again, in a room I didn’t recognize.

I saw a bed with a red-colored comforter and pillowcases. There was a desk in the corner, two dressers, and a large screen television on the wall. As much as I wanted to find the remote control to check it out, I stepped out of the room into the hallway. The lights automatically came on the moment my foot hit the floor.

“Awesome,” I said to myself as I walked down the hallway into a great room, like a hub that connected to other parts of the house. In the center of the room was a massive staircase leading up to a landing with furniture before it continued to the second floor. How large was this house?

“Whose house is this?” The room was huge with photographs, paintings, and murals of wildflowers and wildlife adorned almost every wall. My eyes tracked to each image and how they looked like one picture, separated into pieces. “I know I’ve seen these pictures before…but from where?”

I turned to a set of doors on my right and opened them to reveal a massive storage closet holding Christmas decorations, including a grandiose tree. I closed the doors and walked across the floor to the staircase.

“At least I’m not trapped upstairs this time.”

I looked at the wooden banisters and then up the stairs before walking to the other side of the room to another set of double doors.

“Is there an exit behind door number two?”

I opened them to see another dark room, but there were dimmed lights coming from the corner. I stomped my foot down, thinking that would turn the lights on, but no, there was a simple switch on the wall. I flipped it and the room was bathed in bright lights that soon lowered to a setting less than the surface of the sun. In the center of the room sat an air hockey table. It was a little small, maybe designed for kids. I heard a series of blips and beeps behind me. I recognized those sounds so I turned to see a small arcade with three games. I recognized BurgerTime and NARC, but the third machine was something I’d never seen before. Four turtles stood across the side of the cabinet, each wearing a different colored mask.

I walked toward it.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” I whispered,“looks fun.”

I moved closer to the other two games.

“They have good taste, it’s something I would do.” I snapped out of my dream of owning such a set-up and ran back into the great room. I turned around and looked at the doors in front of the staircase and opened them to reveal a small room, and just beyond, a large wooden door that looked like it was the exit.

“Time to leave!” I placed my hand on the doorknob and noticed a flashing blue light on a small monitor with a display reading: Alarm Armed. I looked at the alarm display and moved my right hand towards the display but then pulled it back. It wasn’t like I knew how to turn it off.

“Great,” I replied to myself. “Just great.”

I spun around to see if someone was behind me, ready to grab or slam my shoulder again, but no one was there. I ran back into the great room and then upstairs.

“Definition of insanity,” I said as I reached a large landing area that had a sofa and lounger chair and then ran up to the second floor.

The second floor was just as spacious as the room below, adorned with more pictures and paintings, but these were more like someone spilled some paint and got paid for it. There was another feeling of someone behind me, and I threw my shoulder back into the empty air so hard I spun around to face a mirror. I froze at my reflection to see the person staring back at me was me, but not the me I’d seen in the bathroom mirror at school. I was a lot taller, my shoulders wider, my face older. How much older, I couldn’t tell.

I stepped closer. So did he. I touched my face, then he touched his.

“That’s me.”

Then something flashed near the bottom of the mirror. I looked at my left hand and there was a ring on it. I stared at it for several seconds and raised my hand up to my face.

“I’m married?” I asked, but it wasn’t my voice. It was an older, deeper voice. “Maybe my wife can bail me out after I’m arrested for being here.”

I walked into the room on the left and, like the hallway downstairs, the lights automatically came up to illuminate yet another big screen television mounted on the wall with what looked like a VCR underneath with two microphones connected. Beside it was a shelf full of what looked like VHS tape cases, but thinner. There must have been a hundred or so.

“Kara-o-key? What is that and how much money do these people have?”

I sat down on a couch that stood several feet back from the screen and stared at the blank screen.

“There’s something about this that’s familiar…No, no it’s not, it’s just I don’t believe this is real…how did I even get here?”

I leaned back on the couch and tried to think, but nothing was coming to my mind. “Okay, time to find a way out of here.”

I ran out of the room, back to the stairway but stopped at the door in the middle. It looked different—heavy and made of metal but I opened the door with ease and the air had that sharp, clean smell that always hung around a swimming pool.

There was a pool on the second floor of the house!

“And he said it couldn’t be done,” I whispered. “I want my ten points back for that assignment, Mr. Call.” I looked back to the door and then to the pool. “Wait…wait a minute. I. I know this house! I drew this, and here it is!”

I heard a series of chirps and a voice saying “Front door opened.”

“It’s like I’m on the Enterprise-D!”

“Jason!” A female voice called out, “I’m back.”

My hand went over my mouth to stop the instinct to respond to my name. “She can’t be talking to me, could she?”

“Jason Alexander Dennereck!” The voice said, louder this time.

“Who is that?” I crept to the door and walked out, trying to stay out of the view of whoever it was in the house who knew my name. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I heard footsteps walking up the stairs. I decided to stand up and put my hands in the air in surrender.

That’s when I saw her face.

Tiffany.

She wasn’t twelve, she was older, but still beautiful. I watched her come up the last two steps. “You left the pool door open.”

“Do you…live here?”

Tiffany stared at me. “Jason, we live here.”

“We?”

“We’re married, remember?” She raised her hand to reveal a ring on her finger.

“I feel a bit lost,” I replied as she walked over and took my hands.

“We're not lost.”

“I, I don’t really recognize everything. The house, the video games in that room. I do remember the pool”

“You really don't remember?”

“Not really,” I replied, as I tried to kind of laugh off the situation. I didn’t want to look completely clueless to her, but I failed miserably at that.

“What would you like me to say?” she asked as she let my right hand go and squeezed my left hand.

“I don’t know. Maybe something like, ‘Jason, you’ve apparently lost your mind.’”

“That wouldn't be the first time,” she replied with a laugh.

“Have I always been this forgetful?” I asked.

“You have always been this forgetful.”

“Great.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand. “But you always remember the important things.”

I looked down at the rings. They matched in color and style.

I stared at them for several seconds before looking up to her face. “When did we get married?”

She didn't answer right away. “Last Saturday, of course.”

I looked at her. “What?”

“No,” she said with a laugh, “we've been married for twenty-eight years.”

“Twenty-eight?”

“Yes.”

I did some quick math in my head, and I was never good at math.

“How old am I?”

She gave me a questioning look and led us downstairs to the great room and then into the dining room. The table was ornate and made of the darkest wood I had ever seen. I pulled out a chair for her and allowed her to sit before I sat down at the next chair.

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“How can I try to believe it if you don’t tell me?” She asked, her blue eyes shining in the light of the crystal fixture above.

“I was at school.”

“What school?”

“Prattville Junior High.”

“Junior high?” she replied as she stared at me.

“Yes, it’s crazy, right?”

“What year?”

“1989, on a Tuesday, maybe.”

“You're serious?” she asked.

“Maybe it was just a dream,” I said with a sigh.

Tiffany looked at me for a long moment, then she smiled. “You're still there,” she replied as she tapped her hand on the table.

“Where?”

“In seventh grade.”

I didn't know what to say. I looked around the dining room. There was a mix of paintings and photos on the wall, including one displaying what looked like a wedding. I gazed wide-eyed at the picture of the two of us standing in the middle of a large gathering of people. I recognized Keith standing nearby, along my parents and her parents…but everyone else was blurry.

“I’m still there, but I’m here too?”

Tiffany walked over and touched my cheek. “Do you remember me?”

I turned to her, “I remember you.”

“That isn't what I meant.”

“I remember you at school.”

“Doing what?” she asked with a smile.

“Nothing,” I replied as I looked back at the picture. We looked happy.

“Nothing?”

“That's kind of the problem.”

“You had a crush on me,” she said with a laugh.

My face got hot at that revelation. “How did you know?”

“You weren't exactly subtle.”

“I thought I was.” I replied as she led us out of the dining room, back into the main room.

“You stared at me.”

“I did not,” I lied.

“You did.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, this is so embarrassing.”

“It gets worse,” Tiffany replied as she walked over to a bookshelf and opened a small drawer below one of the shelves.

“How?”

“You wrote about me.”

“What?”

She reached into the drawer, pulled out a small notebook and handed it to me.

I opened it and turned through multiple pages of poems. Page after page, her name was everywhere, and all of it in my handwriting. I looked at
her.

“You kept these?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because they were ours.”

I stared at the pages again. I recognized my name, I recognized her name, but I didn't recognize the life.

“Did I ever ask you out?”

She smiled and then answered: “No.”

“Then how did this happen?”

“You finally talked to me,” she replied with a shrug.

“I did?”

“It wasn't easy,” she said as she flipped a page with her finger.

“How hard could it have been?”

“You once spent an entire lunch period trying to figure out whether saying hello would be too forward.”

“Yeah,” I groaned, “that sounds exactly like me.”

She leaned toward me and replied. You were scared.”

“Of you?”

“Of everything.”

I looked down at the notebook. “I spent thirty-seven years thinking about you,” I whispered.

“I know,” Tiffany whispered back.

“How?”

“Because you told me.”

We walked across the room to a sitting room.

“What did I say?”

“You said you always wondered what would have happened if you'd asked.”

I looked at her as we stood in the room.

“And?”

“And eventually you did.”

I felt something tighten in my chest.

“Was it worth it?”

She looked at me for a long time before replying. “It was a life. And I wouldn’t trade it.”

I looked around the room and noticed a picture I had seen somewhere before.

“Do we have kids?” I asked.

“Three,” Tiffany replied with a wide grin.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember why the image looked familiar to me. I could see their faces clearly. “Jaye”

Tiffany’s eyes widened. “Yes.”

“Anaïs?” I nearly stammered.

“Yes.”

“Serena?” I asked and it was Tiffany’s turn to stare at me.

“How do you know their names?”

I didn't answer because I didn’t have an answer, because I didn’t know. Not really. Where had I seen them before? It was as if I had held memories that weren't mine. I had watched them laugh. I had watched them live in a house that somehow belonged to me. And suddenly, I understood: They weren't redshirts on an away mission. They were people.

“Are they happy?” I asked.

Tiffany smiled. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“They’re kids, Jason. Happy depends on which five minutes you ask them about.”

“Right.” We both laughed at that.

“Come on,” she said as we walked down the hallway to the front door.

I followed her outside and looked across the street at a familiar looking house. Not because I remembered it. Because I had already been there. We walked across the street and onto the walk leading up to the house.

The front door opened before we reached it and a girl who looked about twelve or thirteen sprang up from behind it. “Dad!”

She ran toward me and I froze. The girl wrapped her arms around me and I hugged her back. I didn't really remember her. But somehow I knew exactly how to hold her.

The girl then pulled away and looked at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s been a strange day.”

She looked at Tiffany. “Mom?”

Tiffany shook her head. “Like your dad said, it's been a strange day.”

Jaye looked back at me.

“You forgot again, didn't you?”

I smiled. “Something like that.”

She hugged me again.

Behind her stood two other girls. Three girls. Three lives: Jaye, Anaïs and Serena. Three people who existed because of choices I didn't remember making. I looked at them and understood why my twin had been so desperate. He wasn’t trying to find Tiffany. He was trying to find the life he thought he’d missed.

I looked back to the house we had walked out of, and it was no longer there. It had turned to a simple two-story house like all of the other houses up and down the block.

That night, I sat alone in the living room. The house was quiet. I looked at the family photographs on the wall. There I was. Smiling. Holding Jaye while standing next to Charlie, holding Serena with Anaïs standing in front of us, her tongue sticking out.

I looked happy and I probably was. But I still had a question. “What if?”

“You see it now?”

I turned around to see my future self standing behind me. He looked older than I remembered as he walked toward me and sat in a lounger chair near the wall.

“I see them,” I replied.

“That wasn't the plan, you know. We could have changed everything.”

I looked back at him.

“Why?”

“Because I never stopped wondering.”

“You were willing to erase them?”

He looked away. “I wasn’t thinking of everybody.”

“How could you not think about them?” I hissed and stormed over, causing my mirror me to rise up from the chair.

“Because I was thinking about you.” He didn't look angry in his reply. He just looked sad. “I loved her.”

“I know.”

“I still do.”

“I know,” I replied as our eyes locked for a second. He then moved past me and looked at the pictures on the wall.

“I just wanted to know what it would have been like. I thought about the roses. The school. The boat. The island. The tornado. All those dreams. All those years.”

“You didn't want another life,” I said, and he looked at me. “You wanted another chance.”

“What's the difference?” he asked with a sad smile, “a chance happens once.”

I looked at the pictures with him. “A life happens every day.”