Samantha blinked her eyes open to a pounding headache. The sterile white light of the hospital room pressed down on her temples, as if her very skull were being squeezed from the inside. She tried to focus on the blurred shapes surrounding her—machines beeping, tubes feeding her veins, and the faint smell of antiseptic. It took a moment to remember.
The accident.
A truck had run a red light. The impact sent her car spinning out of control, the world twisting violently, metal crumpling like paper, and then… darkness.
She had survived. But the doctors weren’t sure how. There had been talk of brain damage, trauma—something she couldn’t fully process as the days slipped by in a haze of medications and groggy consciousness. Finally, she was discharged with stern warnings from her doctor. There might be side effects, blackouts, memory lapses, confusion. All of it was normal for someone with a brain injury, he assured her. “Give it time,” he had said. “You’ll heal.”
But that was before the strangeness began.
The first blackout came two days after she returned home. She had been in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea, when a wave of dizziness washed over her. She blinked, gripping the counter for support. The next thing she knew, she was standing in her bedroom, disoriented.
Her tea had gone cold. Hours had passed.
She frowned, trying to remember how she had ended up in her room, but it was as if her mind hit a wall. A complete blank.
Confused but unwilling to alarm herself, Samantha brushed it off. Maybe it was just exhaustion from the accident. But that night, as she undressed, she noticed bruises—deep, purple blotches on her arms and legs. They hadn’t been there earlier.
Had she fallen? Stumbled during her blackout?
The next day, things escalated.
She woke up in the middle of the night, standing in her living room, her fingers sticky with ink. There, on the walls, were words written in messy, jagged script: “Who are you?” The question repeated over and over, hundreds of times, in black marker she didn’t remember buying. Her heart pounded, adrenaline surging through her veins as she stared at the writing. She didn’t recognize her own handwriting.
Her hands trembled as she scrubbed the walls clean, panic blooming in her chest. She must’ve done it. There was no one else in the house, no one else who could have written the words. But she had no memory of it—just another blackout, another lapse.
Days turned into a blur of confusion. Samantha began finding strange objects in her home: a set of keys that didn’t belong to her, a notebook filled with cryptic symbols and notes in a handwriting she didn’t recognize, and worst of all, a wedding ring. She wasn’t married. She had never been married.
Every time she confronted her doctor, he dismissed her concerns with clinical detachment. “These things happen,” he said. “The mind can play tricks after trauma. Don’t stress yourself.” He prescribed stronger medication, but it only made her feel like she was sinking into a fog.
The blackouts became more frequent, and each time she woke, her surroundings seemed subtly altered. One morning, she woke to find the kitchen clock running backwards. Another, the walls were painted a color she didn’t remember choosing. Bruises continued to appear, darker, more vivid, as if she were fighting in her sleep.
Then came the messages.
She would wake to find scrawled notes around the house: “She doesn’t belong here,” “I am real,” “Leave.” The handwriting varied—some notes were sharp and aggressive, others neat and precise. It felt like someone, or something, was trying to communicate with her, trying to warn her.
Desperate, Samantha set up cameras around her house, hoping to catch whatever was happening during her blackouts. When she watched the footage the next morning, what she saw nearly stopped her heart.
It was her. She watched herself wander the house at night, aimlessly, as if in a trance. But something was off. In one recording, she moved with a limp she didn’t have, her posture hunched, as if carrying the weight of something heavy. In another, she spoke to herself in a language she didn’t know. And in one terrifying instance, she sat in front of the mirror, staring into her reflection, whispering: “Which one of us is real?”
Frantic, she began investigating, searching through the notebook filled with symbols, trying to decode what was happening to her. That’s when she found a passage scribbled in the margins: “We are fragments, splintered across realities. Only one can survive.”
She reread it over and over, her pulse quickening. Fragments? Splintered realities? What did that even mean?
Her mind raced, trying to make sense of the impossible. What if her blackouts weren’t just blackouts? What if, during those lost moments, she was slipping into another version of herself? Another life? The idea seemed absurd, but the evidence—the strange objects, the cryptic messages, the wedding ring—it all pointed to one terrifying conclusion. She was living multiple lives, across different realities, and each blackout was a transition to another version of herself.
But why?
It wasn’t until she blacked out again, this time waking in an entirely different house, that the truth became undeniable.
She blinked awake, lying on a couch she didn’t own, in a living room that wasn’t hers. The walls were decorated with family photos of people she didn’t recognize—except for her. She was in the photos, standing beside a man she didn’t know, holding a child she had never seen.
Panic surged through her. This wasn’t her life. But as she stood up, her legs felt weak, unsteady, as if they were used to a different body. The air felt wrong, heavier, as if she had slipped into a world just slightly out of sync with her own.
Frantically, she rushed through the house, searching for answers, but what she found was worse than anything she could have imagined.
In a drawer, hidden beneath papers, was a journal—her handwriting, her words, but recounting events she didn’t remember living. In this world, she had been in the accident too. But she hadn’t survived.
She was dead.
Her knees buckled. The truth hit her like a cold blade. Each time she blacked out, she wasn’t just slipping into another life—she was slipping into another version of herself. A version that had lived differently, made different choices, survived or died in the accident. But the realities were collapsing. The boundaries between her selves were thinning, and each version of her was fighting for dominance.
Only one of her could survive.
The next blackout was different. Samantha awoke in her own bed, but she wasn’t alone. There was a woman standing at the foot of her bed—her, but not her. This version of Samantha looked gaunt, her eyes sunken and wild, her skin pale and bruised.
“I’ve come to take what’s mine,” the other Samantha whispered, her voice a low rasp. “This world belongs to me.”
Samantha backed away, her heart pounding. “What do you want?”
The other Samantha smiled—a twisted, broken smile. “Only one of us can live. You know that.”
The realization crashed over her. The blackouts, the bruises, the strange objects—they weren’t just coincidences. They were signs of the war between her selves. The other versions of Samantha were trying to take over, fighting for the right to exist in the one reality that hadn’t yet collapsed.
And she was losing.
The final confrontation came swiftly. Days blurred into nights, each blackout more terrifying than the last. Samantha could feel the walls of reality closing in, feel the presence of her other selves growing stronger. Each time she woke, the lines between the worlds became harder to distinguish. She was slipping, and soon, she wouldn’t be able to come back.
The last time she blacked out, she woke in a place that wasn’t anywhere at all—a vast, empty void, with fragments of her other lives flickering in and out of existence. There, standing before her, were all the versions of herself—each one broken, twisted in ways she couldn’t comprehend.
“We are all you,” they whispered in unison. “But only one can remain.”
Samantha felt herself being pulled apart, her mind fracturing under the weight of a thousand lives lived, a thousand realities collapsing into one. She had to choose.
With a final, desperate scream, she made her decision.
And when she opened her eyes, the world was still.
She was the last Samantha standing. But as she stared into the mirror, the face that looked back at her wasn’t her own.
It was all of them. Every version of herself, fused into one.
She was whole. But she was no longer just Samantha.
She was the fragments of every life she had lived, every choice she had made, every reality that had collapsed—and she could never forget that the other versions were still there, waiting in the shadows of her mind, ready to reclaim what they had lost.
But for now, she was the one who survived.
Want to read a bit more? Find some more of my writings here-
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