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It’s more fragments than anything solid, these days. The flash of the camera blinding her as she tries to force a smile; the cool metal of a badge being pressed into her hand; blossoming hope and pride mixed with something that might be desperation: these things make up the foundation of her new life, her new identity.
Anabel pulls her arms over her head and presses her face into her pillow in an attempt to recapture it: the day she forged herself.
But all she manages is a muddy-water painting made up of relief and pride and the security of a weight in her pocket that was not there before.
It’s such a necessary part of her now that the memory ought to be the sort to linger, but she can feel it trickling away like so many grains of sand through her hands.
She dreams of lungs full of water and terrified screaming, of the sun on her face and a sharp knowledge of having failed that is so strong she can’t let it go even upon waking.
They are remnants of her former life, she’s sure, something and someone she’ll never fully know again. It’s not fair that she has to remember them instead of aspects of her life she wants to keep.
She reaches over to her nightstand and retrieves her badge, flipping it open before letting it rest on the pillow near her head. She stares at the unflattering picture of herself, at the arbitrary date of birth she’d been forced to pick and the blank space where there should be a surname.
It hadn’t seemed an unusual thing to do for the first few months on the job, but somehow it’s become a habit.
It’s been ten years and she’s still doing it, sometimes: clinging to her ID to convince herself that something tethers her to the world. Logic would dictate that if she has the badge, the memories of receiving it are real, but there are days when her new memories feel drowned out by the old and she can’t be quite sure she’s not in the hospital again, waking up for the first time since her rescue, her mind a terrifying blank.
She knows she’s more than that, now, and she’s more than an officer of the International Police, more than Mr. Looker’s boss, more than everything she doesn’t remember. She’s the sum of a decade of new memories and perhaps the old ones, too.
Yet she looks at her badge and reminds herself: this is who I am.