A thin strip of morning light pressed through the window and fell across my face.
I flinched at the brightness.
My eyes opened.
For a moment, I didn't move. The world settled into focus slowly, as if my mind was piecing it together one hesitant breath at a time.
A ceiling I hadn't seen in decades stared back at me.
My first thought was simple: I'm alive.
My second came with confusion: Hospitals don't look like this.
The third settled in my chest with a cold rush: Why does my body feel young?
I blinked hard.
My arms were resting over a thin blanket. When I lifted my hands, I froze.
They didn't look like mine.
Not the hands I died with.
No age spots.
No looseness in the skin.
No tremor from exhaustion.
Just hands I remembered from a different lifetime.
My breath caught, and I pushed myself upright.
I expected pain. I braced for it.
But nothing tore through my ribs.
My legs didn't scream.
My neck didn't burn.
The ease of movement frightened me more than the crash ever did.
The small room around me came into focus. Pale walls. Old wooden dresser. Clothes stacked on milk crates. A flickering lamp in the corner that always needed to be hit twice before working.
I stared at it, stunned.
"This can't be my mother's house," I whispered.
But it was.
The same cramped apartment I lived in during the early 2000s, back when life was disappointing but not yet devastating.
My pulse hammered under my skin.
I pushed the blanket aside and stood. My legs held my weight. They felt solid, steady, as if the years of overwork and fear had never happened.
I moved toward the bathroom.
Each step felt unreal—like walking through someone else's memory.
The switch clicked when I flipped it. The old bulb buzzed, then cast a harsh yellow glow over the sink.
I lifted my head.
The woman in the mirror wasn't fifty-one.
She wasn't bruised from a collision.
She wasn't worn down by debt, regret, and years of bad choices.
I stared at her twenty-nine-year-old face.
Fuller cheeks.
Clearer eyes.
A jawline that hadn't yet been softened by stress and sleepless nights.
My knees weakened, and I grabbed the edge of the sink.
"This isn't possible."
My voice cracked in the empty bathroom.
I pressed my fingers to my cheeks. Warm. Firm. Young.
I pinched the inside of my arm. Pain shot through clearly.
I slapped my own cheek harder than necessary.
It stung.
Water from the faucet was cold enough to pull a gasp from me when I splashed it across my face.
Everything was real.
I turned toward the hallway, heart racing. A calendar still hung on the wall beside the kitchen doorway. A free one from the insurance company, the same one my mother always kept.
I stepped closer.
JANUARY 2003.
I reached out and touched the paper. The corner curled slightly under my fingertip.
Not a dream.
Not a hallucination.
Not the seconds before death.
I backed away from the wall and felt the truth settle over me like a weight that didn't crush—it stunned.
I wasn't fifty-one anymore.
I wasn't in the wreck.
I wasn't dying.
I wasn't trapped in the aftermath of every mistake.
I was twenty-nine.
And I was standing in the first year everything began to go wrong.
Twenty-two years of choices, pain, and consequences lived inside a body that hadn't made them yet.
My throat tightened.
This was impossible.
Yet here I was.
Alive.
Young.
Back at the beginning.
The soft creak of the hallway floor reached my ears, followed by a small, familiar voice I had mourned for years.
"Mom?"
I turned toward it, heart pounding.