Free My Deja Vu Lover by Phoebe Matthews

Macbeth had gone home.  
       That was okay with me as long as they went with me to this session. Macbeth joined us because Tom’s car had quit again and we needed transportation and no matter how much he disapproved, Macbeth always saved us. Also, I think he wanted to see one session so he could discover its flaws and point them out to us.
       We were instructed to lie down on the dusty carpet. We could hear the rain hitting the old windows.      
       Beside me, Macbeth muttered, “Smells like cats.”
       The other people in the room stretched out around us. Our leader, Glenda, sat on a chair in our center. As she spoke, I took a last look at the shadowed corners of the old room, then closed my eyes. Her voice drifted, a tone, a slightly Canadian accent, and then it became a shape, her shape, something lumpy and gray.
       “Relax your muscles, relax easily, first you will feel your forehead becoming smooth, visualize it as smooth, feel the pleasure of this smoothness as though a warm cloth is moving gently across your brow, over your closed eyes, warm, comfortable...”   Her voice was soft yet carried easily, brushing aside thoughts. Her face remained on my eyelids, now a pale glow without features.
       “You are warm now and safe. I will only take you places where you are safe. You will dwell with happy thoughts...”
       My mind filled with images of yellow smiley face stickers and then the glow turned to sunlight, as though I were lying on a beach. I understood her words, relaxed my body and mind as she directed, yet did not remember anything she had said previously.
       There was only the moment through which she was leading me. I had a feeling it was someone else who led me, someone who grasped my hand. I felt, rather than saw, a shadow figure beside me.
       “You are a child again, it is your fifteenth birthday, you are remembering a happy moment.”
       I saw a circle of warm light and felt a hand. Nothing else came to me.
       “You are ten now...”   That might be true. I felt smaller. I wanted to run. I hated lying still. I was aware of some unhappiness, and then I was drifting, no longer part of the feeling.
       “You are five...” the voice murmured and for the first time, I saw myself, small plump hands lifting and fluffing layers of pink net that swirled around me. I heard my mother say, “Doesn’t she look pretty, Harold?” and I felt her bending over me, didn’t look up because I was so entranced with my princess costume.
       My mind no longer separated the words. I accepted the voice and followed it as though it was a thought of my own. Someone held me closely in an embrace. I felt her love and her sorrow, then I was cold and frightened and then I was floating, a mind without a body, a wisp of cloud, but I could feel others near me. A voice continued to guide me.
       And then I was standing on pavement that burned through the thin leather soles of my slippers. I was no longer in a passing dream of mother, voice, brief impressions. I was there. I was someone else in another place and time and all memory of my life as April disappeared.
       My name was Millie and everyone called me Silver, said it would be a good name for my image and maybe I should get one of those crimped bobs and have the beauty parlor peroxide my hair for the popular platinum blond look. But Laurence said no, don’t, because he liked the fluff of curls and the natural dark blond.
       “You’re so pretty just the way you are,” he said and ran his hands down my arms and made me shiver.
       I would do anything at all to make him love me.
     
    CHAPTER 8
       “Lie quietly with your eyes closed,” the voice said. “Let your memories drift slowly away, leaving you rested.”   
       I was April again, hollow inside, wanting to scream his name and run after him, and then I heard the rain hitting the window. Fingers touched mine. I shivered.
       “Hey, babe.”
       All right, I