It was happening again. That sickening icy coat that enveloped me. It climbed through my eyes into my head and fed me pictures of myself, me but not me.

Walking towards school,  I sank to the ground. The image of a newer street from an earlier landscape clawed its way through my mind.

I saw a woman running through freshly carved roads. She was dressed in Victorian dress, running through town in her huge skirt. All color gone from her face, she resembled some sort of 19th century ghost. I didn’t know how I knew it, but this girl, this old fashioned oddity was somehow me. The rhythm of her  heels pounding pavement echoed through my own feet, the pulse at her temple reverberated through my skull. I could feel the hot sweat trickling down her back, frozen in fear; her knees wobbled but kept moving through the dark gray streets. She ran blindly with abandon but weak with terror, until a heavy mass pushed her to the ground and everything went blank.

I untucked my head from between my knees squinting into the white sun and confused crowd that hesitantly continued their pedestrian paths. The chill had disappeared and I felt a burning in my own throat and sticky baby hairs clinging cowardly to my forehead. Shakily getting to my feet I resumed my path to school, pulling out my phone to add this particular episode to the season I had begun to unwittingly accumulate. At some point I'd have to tell someone and deal with it.

I looked down at my outfit. Of course there were mean little dirt streaks running from my butt to thigh. On the skirt I’d bought yesterday, great. Today was just a s*** storm of bad luck.

Walking into school I felt shaky and sore, heart beating loud and fast like an underground club's bass. I had calc first period but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit through an hour of combinatorial equations, so instead I curled up in one of the bathroom stalls on the top floor of the building.

I didn't know what it all meant, but I was scared. Now that it had happened five times, it felt real, it felt like a cause for worry. I was maybe one or two away from a kicking, screaming, shoving nervous breakdown. Now, I was just barely on the edge of the cliff if I concentrated hard enough I could maintain balance.

The first of them had come only a few weeks ago. I had brushed it off as a dream, but it didn't seem that way now. I had seen a withered old women carrying a fruit basket along the shadow of a tractor's path through a used farm. You could tell she'd been beautiful once but long years of pain and labor had taken from her until there was nothing left to give. She was happy now and it was a happiness foreign and overdue. But then she had heard the thick rumble of an oncoming tractor and the world had gone dark. That's when I had woken up gasping and drenched in hot sweat. It had felt as if there was some thing inside of me banging at the sides of my body, begging to escape. It had been excruciating but I'd written it off as a migraine until the second and third and fourth times it happened. Women of different ages, different ethnicities, but always in their last moments, and always, always me.

What was happening? My head felt heavy as if weighed down by the ghosts of my mind. I took a deep breath, holding it until oxygen clouded my eyes, and then I let it out. I would not think about this today, I would not be sad or scared, I would be strong.

I walked out of the stall glancing at my reflection in the smudged mirror. I looked good­­well, I looked okay. The bell rang and I opened the door, walking to my next class.

I sat down in my seat next to the window. I was great, I was fine, I was okay.?

"Hey." Maria said elbowing me. I jumped, torn away from the inside of my mind.

"Are you okay?" She asked, concerned.

"Yeah...yeah."?

"Good.” She brightened. “Check it out.” She nodded towards a sandy­haired head three seats in front of her.?

“Since when did we get a new kid?”

”I dunno know, but who cares? He’s f***ing hot.”

I laughed. “Okay?”

“Seriously. I say we corner him before Ashley’s crew does.”

“Shut up, you sound psycho.”

She laughed, poking at me playfully. “Fine, okay, pretend like you don’t wanna see what he looks like.”

I sighed loudly, exasperated at my best friend’s subtle attempts at pairing me off. Several people turned in their seats to look at me curiously. I had sighed too loud.

But then the teacher came in and everyone turned around and I was free again to melt into my desk. Except I could feel one set of eyes that remained focused on me. I ducked my head further, trying to abate that tingly feeling at my scalp but from the outskirts of my vision I could see that it was the new guy’s eyes that still rested on me.

New beginnings, right? I squeezed my eyes shut hard enough for pain to signal a release, and then I opened them and raised my head to meet his..

And he was hot. Hot like if chili peppers, the sun, and Ryan Gosling had a party in their underwear. We remained locked in each other's gazes and it should have felt weird. It should have felt awkward and uncomfortable and a thousand other synonyms. Yet here we were and there was something about him. It wasn't just that his hazel eyes smiled at me through is long lashes, that his sleep swept dirty blond hair looked as if it would be silky if I were to run my hands through it, or even that his face had probably been sculpted from the mold of Jesus’ sexy brother. It was the understanding buried somewhere within that golden iris, the comfort whispering at the tug of his mouth, and the familiarity wrinkling from the curve of his nose.

But then that icy warning started to creep up my spine and I had to tear my eyes away.

My upper body fell to the desk, and my teeth stabbed my lip to keep from screaming. The cold had spread to my skull and I could feel every bone in my body tingle and then freeze as I was pushed into the tumbling black.

I saw the women that had haunted me for weeks; women with sunken eyes and bright eyes, stick­like bodies and soft ones, frizzy locks and straight wisps, dirty rags and shiny gowns. But they disappeared and now there were hundreds of men of different ages and races, all as chillingly familiar as their fairer counterparts.

Why did I know that if I looked behind the ear of the man with the yellow eyes and orange hair, I would find a seven pointed star shaped birthmark; or that the man with the lopsided eyes and pink nose had a slight platform in his left boot because of uneven ankle lengths. I didn't recognize these men, yet I felt irreparably connected to them. They appeared in front of me and then were gone in a second, replaced by another face. The portrait storm flooded me. I could feel each of their deaths pushing against my chest and I gasped for air. Like some sort of torturous flip book, the men kept appearing and vanishing and the burn in my chest grew alight with fire. I saw one more face before it all went blank, a face that made my stomach violently dance and my eyelashes flutter. And then I was at my desk back in the fluorescent classroom.

No one had seen the episode, except for him. But he was looking up dazedly now as well; with his chest clutched by the desk and his fingers digging painfully into his arm. I had seen him in my head and I think he had seen me as well.

It felt like it all made sense as we stared at eachother. I knew who I was, who he was. All because of this boy I'd never met; a boy I'd never talked to or seen before. But I had, I just hadn’t remembered.

This was the boy who walked the surface of my mind and ran around my subconscious. His eyes were like freshly clean laundry, like a eucalyptus scented steam room. He was jasmine bath salts and lavender kisses.

Our teacher's words faded on the page and it was only us. Now, then, before, and after. Once the bell rang I walked haltingly towards him. I think Maria was calling to me, but it didn't really matter. We didn't break eye contact as I approached. It was as if a string connected us, I couldn't pull my eyes from his. Looking into them I saw all the men of my mind.

“Hi.” I said.

“Hi.” He said.