It was one moment. One moment of realization. I feel it slipping from my grasp. I must remember...

Could this be coming back? This isn't possible. This is pure imagination.

No. This is no dream. This is a memory. Foggier by the moment, and yet, once an existing reality, burned into my mind...

Burning.

Burning.

I stood in the center of my room, staring off at the cork board I had hung above my desk, pinned with all the evidence of my disappearance. My reappearance, the fire, the blue hair on the bed sheets, Jackson's apparent monster in his closet...

As I had done in chemistry, my memory played the ending moments of the flashback back like a deteriorating projector: as the big, hairy creature disappeared into the door, which then was consumed by fire.

Monsters in the closet.

Lightning struck my blood.

My mind was flooded in chaos, overwhelmed with the connections: clarity of the situation I had been blind to before.

I had been taken.

By a, a--

I dug my fingers into my face.

No. No, this isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't happening. This isn't real.

I got up, and examined my cork board once again, letting possible theories bounce around inside my skull.

How could this be happening?

"Maybe," I thought out loud, my fingernail tapping my crooked teeth. "The theory of the multiverse?"

I took a step back. What had begun as a humble quest for answers to a disappearance had turned into questions about parallel universes.

Absolutely not.

I've actually gone insane. Someone write it down. Log it, stamp it, seal it, and off to the mental ward I go.

My heart leapt back to the night I stood at Jackson's closet.

But... But could it?

* * *

I lay on the floor like a starfish, staring at the ceiling. My buzzing mind wandered further and further away from anything ground in logic.

"I was taken by a monster." I hit my hand on the floor. "You hear that, world? TAKEN BY A FREAKING—"

I shuddered. The thought of being grabbed by something so horrendous as a—

"Kitty?"

What is it with Kitty? Kitty Kitty Kitty. What is Kitty? What does that even mean?

It's that blue and purple monster from my drawing. It's the monster from my vision.

Did he take me?

"The beast will make off with your children. He'll come after them in the night. Set to sacrifice our children to his monstrous appetite—"

"NO!" I slammed my fists on the scratched hardwood floor.

My fisted hands relaxed. My voice fell to a hushed cry.

"No."

"Boo! Boo, oh, you're all right! I was so worried! I was-- Don't you ever run away from me again, young lady! Oh, but I'm so glad you're safe."

I rolled my head to the side.

"But, if not him, who? Why was I taken? What happened to me while I was gone? Where did I go? Why was I returned after such a short period? What was intended for me? And again, why? Why was I taken into the closet? Why did all of this happen?" I asked myself out loud.

But the more questions I thought, the more they started to draw towards the blue and purple monster.

What happened to him?

Is there a reason I haven't heard from him since?

I imagined the image of the cracked blazing door shutting behind him burned into my mind.

My head and shoulders shuddered with wrath.

"That's preposterous, Mary." I asserted. I held my breath, perhaps holding my exhale would contain my even more drifting thoughts.

I was wrong.

Now that they were there, they wouldn't go away.

I grew angrier and angrier.

The creature's solemn face as he turned his head into the open door filled me with despair.

Why was I abandoned?

I clenched my jaw.

He left me. He just, just...

Left me.

How could he.

Just leave me here.

Alone.

Alone in this, this, horrible world?

"Why?" I asked. "Why have I been abandoned?"

Fury flickered in my eyes.

And as that door shut--

I stopped those thoughts dead in their tracks. I wouldn't think about it. I would not think about it.

This is madness...

Brewing inside me.

A poison in my life, corroding all of its joy.

I sat up, and began trying to calm myself with yoga. And I succeed for the first twenty minutes. I had begun practicing yoga since I was five, and with it, meditation, and extreme gymnastics, I could get through anything...

I exhaled, only focusing on my breath.

Breath in.

Breath out.

Breath in.

Breath out.

I think of nothing.

I think of nothing...

But from my cow face pose on the floor, once again, I peeked an eye open, sneaking a glimpse up at the photo on the cork board of me the night I was returned.

One sock.

I looked at my left foot.

One... Sock...

I unwound myself from the position. Legs now folded, I eyed my left foot again.

I reached out, and peeled off my left sock.

I bounded to my feet. And as the idiocy of the situation hit me, I began to try to put it back on while yet still standing, hoping on one foot.

We can find it again. Still hoping, I rolled the sock off my foot.

It's useless. I put the sock back on.

There was once a time in my life when everything wasn't deteriorating. I took the sock back off.

We are a million miles apart. Even more.

On.

I must find him. I will, find it.

Off.

We must face reality.

On.

Can you hear me?

Off.

On, off, on, off, on off on off on off on off on—

"ARRHHHHHHGGGGGGG!" I turned, and hurled the sock across the room with all my might. It pelted the wall, and slipped down into the wastebasket.

I swerved around and leaped onto my dresser. Knocking over my chair, swinging on the low hanging chandelier, I catapulted myself into the corner on the other side of the room, scratching the beige wallpaper, desperately trying to climb up the walls. I slipped and fell into the wastebasket. I almost tore the trashcan apart, spilling its contents everywhere. I launched myself into my bunkbed face first. Screaming into my pillow, I pounded the mattress with such force as to tear my limbs from their sockets. I gripped the ends of the pillow and ripped it apart, cotton flying everywhere.

I couldn't take it anymore.

I burst from my room, bouncing on the walls on the way out. Flying through the hallways, zipping down stairs, I threw open the front door of the building and ran into the street.

It was pouring rain. Buckets and buckets and buckets of rain.

I stopped in the center of the street, breathless. Besides the streetlights' orange, hazy glow, the night was black, and empty. Heavy pitter-patter illuminated through the air. The rain soaked my feet and trickled down my face.

If I had cried at that moment, no one would have ever known.

I must not cry.

Raindrops collected in my eyelashes and rolled off my nose.

I mustn't cry. I will not... Cry.

"What are you doing?"

My back straightened. I looked over my shoulder to see Jackson, standing in the street with me, only some feet away. He was in his Lightning McQueen pajama onesie and yellow rain boots on the wrong feet. He clutched the handlebar of an oversized open navy umbrella.

"I don't know."

"Why are you mad?"

I turned away, hugging myself for warmth in the rain. "I don't know."

He paused for a moment, perhaps absorbing my words.

My body ached. The scream in my heart had drained.

I shivered.

"Why are you wearing only one sock?"

The rain crawled down my shirt and clung to my back.

One sock.

One... Sock.

I turned to him in astonishment, arms limply dangling.

"I don't know," I said.

I must know.