before I go to sleep03(文稿)

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This isn’t possible. Beginning to shake, I grip the edge of the sink. 

Another scream starts to rise in my chest and this one erupts as a strangled gasp. 

I step back, away from the mirror, and it is then that I see them. Photographs. Taped to the wall, to the mirror itself. Pictures, interspersed with yellow pieces of gummed paper, felt-tip notes, damp and curling.

I choose one at random. Christine, it says, and an arrow points to a photograph of me- this new me, this old me- in which I am sitting on a bench on a quayside, next to a man. 

The name seems familiar, but only distantly so, as if I am having to make an effort to believe that it is mine. 

In the photograph we are both smiling at the camera, holding hands. He is handsome, attractive, and when I look closely I can see that it is the same man I slept with, the one I left in the bed. 

The word Ben is written beneath it, and next to it Your husband. I gasp, and rip it off the wall. No, I think. No! It can’t be… 

I scan the rest of the pictures. They are all of me, and him. 

In one I am wearing an ugly dress and unwrapping a present, in another both of us wear matching weatherproof jackets and stand in front of a waterfall as a small dog sniffs at our feet. 

Next to it is a picture of me sitting beside him, sipping a glass of orange juice, wearing the dressing gown I have seen in the bedroom next door.

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. 

As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, 

and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.