Serena Saint's dressing room wall is a palimpsest of lost souls.
        Cobain and Edwards, overlapping iterations of kohl-eyed vulnerability. Winehouse, all pouting defiance and collarbones. Joplin grinning above her with feathers in her hair. Hendrix; Morrison. Plath, that unnerving stare boring into you from the middle of the corkboard. The whole club's here. Even Lizzie Siddal, shivering in her bathtub, at the top, Ophelia's river threatening to spill over and drown the lot of them.
        She's the only portrait not looking at me, gaze fixed on the heavens, or some spot on the damp-blotched ceiling, anyway. The rest of them--well, it's a lot of eyes. Disconcerting, when you've just been dredged up into life, fibre by fibre and cell by cell, when you're still feeling it spread out into the nerve-endings and capillaries of this body, still reeling from the snap of awareness. You don't expect to come round and find all that death staring you in the face.
        Had to stick the whole lot up above the mirror, didn't you, Serena?
        Silly question. Of course you did.
        Still. The eyes look at me, and I look back at them through Serena's. Takes me a moment to mutter, "I'm not in any bloody staring contest," and pull myself away.
        I sit forward in the chair, examining Serena's face in the mirror. Pale, with a dusting of freckles that must be what all the tubes of foundation and concealer and miscellaneous skin-gunk are for. Nice eyes. Big and green, darker around the outer rims of the irises, clear like bottle glass except for a tiny patch of brown on the right one, almost touching the pupil.
        I think I read something about that, a life or two ago. Heterochromia. How it means you were twins, once, in the womb, before chance squished you back into one person. Wonder if Serena knew that? If she's always felt that there was someone else just a step to one side of her, looking out at an angle through her eyes?
        There's a knock at the door. Not good. I was hoping for a bit more time to get accustomed.
        It's always the muscle-memory that kicks in first. The rest of it varies. Sometimes it comes in fits and starts. Sometimes, it's a long blank followed by a deluge. Sometimes, it never quite gets there, always a fragment or two still missing. But the body, you can rely on. So, I'm on my feet (Serena's feet) before I know it, tugging my sleeves down before I open the door.
        The guy outside it has his fist raised to knock again, and he seems to startle a little when I answer. He must be used to having to chivvy Serena out of the room.
        Evan, the memory bank supplies, which is a start. Dark hair, bit of a beard, tattoo of something sinuous and delicately-lined twisting up the side of his neck. Bass player. Friend, mostly. Sometime shag (but not right now). He broke it off recently; she didn't feel much.
        It's cold in the corridor. I take a breath: the chalky smell of unoccupied stages.
        "Yeah?" I say. Serena's voice is a touch lower than I expected. Doesn't fit around my inflection quite right, and Evan-the-sometime-fuckbuddy frowns.
        "Need you for soundcheck in ten," he says. "You gonna be ready?"
        I nod mutely, and he shrugs and ducks back into the corridor. I'm already closing the door when his hand stops it.
        "Ree," he says, and the frown's back full force now. "Ree, what the fuck?"
        Uninvited, he reaches out and lifts my (Serena's) sleeve. She's (I'm) wearing this slippery kimono type thing, excess fabric fluttering around her wrists, insubstantial like the touch of an insect's wing. Except where it's sodden with blood.
        I snatch my (Serena's) arm back and lift it up myself, careful, holding the edge pinched between thumb and forefinger. It stings as I peel it away from the sticky skin. Serena's been bleeding for a while.
        "Jesus, Ree," Evan-the-fuckbuddy says. It's tight in his throat; the way people sound when they're not sure they can afford to care anymore. He exhales. "You can't keep hurting yourself like this. You can't."
        I can't say I blame him. Serena Saints are exhausting to live with. I know; I've been enough of them.
        Impulse tells me to reach out--squeeze his hand or pat his shoulder. Experience tells me it's a bad idea. People aren't exactly receptive to comfort in moments like this.
        "I'm gonna be okay," I say instead.
        "You're gonna need stitches. Again."
        "Alright," I tell him. "But then I'm gonna be okay."
        Not the sort of thing she'd usually say. I can see it in the way he looks at me, the guardedness, the turning cogs. But that's good. That's the kind of shit I'm here to sort out. At least, as far as I know what I'm here for.
        He digs in his pocket for his phone and makes a call. "Talk to the manager, will you, Jin? I'm taking her to A&E." His voice is weary. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."
        I sink back onto Serena's chair while he talks, looking down at her arms. I can see all the other times written on the skin, now I know this isn't the first. The fine white crosshatch of old scars on her forearms; the in-between ones, raised and pink; the angry red around picked scabs. And the new slices, red and wet.
        In an abstract way, you have to admire it. The lapidary precision of the cuts. Same as the makeup artfully scattered across the dressing-table, the bottle of vodka with the lights around the mirror shining through it, just so. Did she watch the glass and imagine it a movie screen, herself the tragic starlet at the beginning of her downward spiral?
        The blood's dark under the lights, rich and slow as it beads out of the fine ends of the cuts, like a melted jewel. It'd make a good still life.

        People love to quote that statistic about suicides who've jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the bodies have shoulder injuries; even as they let go, they tried to hold on and save themselves. Nearly everyone who survives an attempt says they regretted it the second their feet left the railings. Me, I'm pretty sure that's a bag of bollocks. If it were true, then there would be more out there like me.
        It was so long ago I don't actually remember what it was about. Years or lives or bodies; count it as you will. I don't even remember who I was, really. It's a hazard of this existence, this superfluity of identities. You forget which one you started with. Sometimes I have a vague sense that I was a woman; that there was a family argument involved. Then I think maybe not. Maybe that wasn't me; that was what's-her-face from three lives ago.
        The one thing I do remember with real, unmerciful clarity is the no. It was cold and pin-sharp, and it hit me as I was falling. Off a rooftop, into the sea, into unconsciousness in a warm bath--take your pick. Wherever I was, I thought, no, and If I'd only, and I should've, and I don't want to go.
        Too late for that life, but something heard me. It plucked me out of the space between life and death. Gave me another chance. A purpose, in a way.
        As for what it was, I haven't got a clue, and I've pretty much given up looking. I just know I've never met another one like me, and if there's a higher authority out there, it isn't picking up the phone. I used to go looking for others. Study faces for the look of dislocation in the eyes, listen for the slip-up that would betray the discomfort of wearing another's skin. I even dropped hints. There had to be someone, I thought; someone in the same boat, as alone and lost as I was. I never found them, and as the years slipped by, I stopped looking.
        Ask me where I am when I'm not here--inhabiting a body and a life that somebody's abandoned--and you won't get much of an answer. I don't really know myself. I'm switched off, I suppose.
        Consciousness starts with the pull, something plucking at the substance--or the insubstance--of me in the dark. It's slow at first, a gradual becoming-conscious of myself. Not of what I am, maybe, but that I am.
        It speeds up after that. The slip-slide down into awareness; the momentum; the jolt of coming awake in the flesh. It's different every time--not the shock, but the what of what follows. I might learn something new.
        Like the way a bleeding cut, a whole bloody catscratch mosaic of them, can feel like nothing until somebody else notices it.
        Serena's the kind you'd look at with contempt, on paper. Nice middle-class upbringing--parents a bit distant, maybe, but no acrimonious divorce, no domestic violence or drinking problems. Bright enough at school, if a touch unfocused; pretty face; plenty of friends. Band successful enough she doesn't have to work a second job to pay the rent, which isn't something you can say for many these days. What's she want to top herself for? I can feel myself thinking it, even, if I'm not careful.
        It's different from the inside. You dig down into the meat and the mess of it, and the idea of something to live for stops making sense. It's the sucking hollow at the centre that rules everything else: a cold, rushing vortex, the darkness between the stars. I've passed the point of judgment these days. Gone one-on-one with the vortex often enough that I wouldn't blame anyone who chooses not to fight. After all, I've been there. It nearly had me.
        So I sort through the attic of our girl's memories. Holding onto the bits that are myself is the hard part. Difficult to identify what's me, beyond the echoes of other lives, though if I had to put a name to it, I'd say maybe just the will to live. I just need to find a little of that in Serena.
        You don't close up the vortex: time or medication will do that, and not much else. If I get her over the first hurdle, I'll make an appointment with a therapist and hope that it helps. But you can brighten the dark with the remembered lights of a city night, and you can drown out the wind that wants to carry you to nowhere with music. It's not a matter of finding lost things. It's more about perspective. I root through the drawers of half-forgotten junk, looking for dull gleams in the dark. I pull them out and blow off the dust.

        A Sunday morning and a hangover in Leicester Square, the morning after their first gig in London. She's wobbly in the sharp sunlight, and she pukes half her breakfast muffin up into a bin in front of an old couple who look at her with twinned frowns.
        Jinny shakes her head with what might be disgust or amusement or both, coffee in hand, smirk on her face, sunnies pulled down over her eyes.
        They flop out on the grass, and Serena cradles her guitar across her legs, and as her headache ebbs, the world comes back into focus. The applause feels better in hindsight: she can pull it close and bury herself in it, without the film of nervousness between her and the room that was there last night.
        She hugs it to herself. The old scars on her arms are silver in the sunlight.

        Evan, the first time. The band is new, only been rehearsing for a few weeks, intoxicated by the sound they can make together and unwilling to let that feeling go. So they go out after practice to drink and congratulate themselves. Her mouth is sticky with Jack Daniels and too-sweet regular Coke, but she's drunk in that kind of way that makes everything clear and easy, suspended in the moment before the world starts spinning. So when the others drift off, one by one, she sticks around with Evan, looking at him very deliberately, resting her feet on the bottom rung of his barstool.
        "'S a bad idea," he says, waving his half-empty pint "Not s'posed to shag your bandmates."
        She shrugs and pins him with her Jolene eyes. "Bad ideas make good songs," she says, and it's that easy.
        Mythology's a trump card; musicians are suckers for it. They're attached at the mouth on the bus home, fumbling the key in his front door and giggling loud enough to wake the housemates, the kind of laughter that's too proud of its own happiness to fully stifle itself. His bedroom curtain doesn't cover all of the window, and in the streetlight his smooth skin looks endless, and she can almost believe that this is endless, that it was a good idea all along.

        She's on her way home from HMV on the bus, with a CD in her bag--because these are our Serena's schooldays, and buying CDs is still what you do. The cover shows a young woman submerged in water, imitating Ophelia in a white-tiled bathroom with a pink flower in her hair.
        Serena runs her fingers over the case. The lyric sheet is her grimoire. She reads over the words as the bus rattles and bumps around suburban streets, as though they're an incantation, and if she turns them over in her head often enough, they'll transport her out of here for good.
        It takes the first burst of sound out of the speakers to do it. All of it punching in at once, guitars like a bludgeon, and that voice over the top of it, a ragdoll caterwaul that loosens a valve and lets flood out all the pain of being girl. It's freefall, it's catharsis, and Serena's got herself a vocation.

        She's eight, skinny legs in shiny red wellies, the red of her hair--still brownish and natural; she hasn't discovered bleach and Manic Panic yet--flying out like a banner in the wind as she climbs up the hill. She started the climb grudging. A drive over the Welsh border and a trek up a pathetic excuse for a mountain aren't exactly the most exciting prospect when you're eight years old, and there are sleepovers to be gone to, after all.
        But the height, or the air, or something, anyway, has livened her up. It's gradual, like being woken by the sun on a morning when there's no school. It builds and builds, and by the time they're halfway up the hill, it's fizzing in her limbs and her lungs, and she's flying with the ache and the fierce joy of it.
        She turns her back on the slope at a shout from below, waiting for her parents to catch up, watching the bright splotches of their cagoules against the scrubby grass. Below them, the patchwork of fields spreads out in the distance, the gleaming lines of houses on the new estates looking like they've been drawn onto the landscape by some giant hand. There's a grey fuzz of mist in the distance. Dad says that when you reach the top you can see all the way to the sea.
        "Bloody hell, Ree," he pants, as they catch up. "Full of life today, aren't you?" He shakes his head at Mum. "She's going to be the death of us, I tell you."
        "You're too slow," Serena complains, and her feet move of their own accord. She can feel the wind plucking at her. It wants to lift her up, wants to take her higher, and they're tethering her to the earth and she's going to burst.
        Mum laughs, glances upward. You can see the top from here. "Go on then," she says. "Don't run."
        And Serena goes, and Mum's shout of "Be careful!" gets whipped away by the wind.
        She turns and turns on the spot once she reaches the top. She can see the land below her in all directions, and it makes her dizzy. She's on top of the world and she doesn't ever want to leave.
        Mum and Dad are still climbing, pausing on the incline below to catch their breaths and swig water. Serena throws her head back and yells into the wind, a great big joyful sound, and the wind takes that away, too. Carries it off into the sky, and Serena imagines it circling the world forever on the wind. A little bit of her always up here, up there, in the clouds.

        Back in the hospital, Evan and a nurse are in low-voiced conversation, most of which doesn't make its way to me through the fog in Serena's head. There are stitches in Serena's arm, and I count them distantly. The rending of flesh always feels like it ought to be final, even though I know better than most that there's no such thing. Even with all those memories shining there above the void, it's hard to feel like these arms are mine, like this is me they've stitched back together.
        There's always a bit of a disconnect with this part. It's physical, happiness. It's all chemicals in the brain, yeah, but that's not what I'm on about. The manifestation of it--it makes you feel light and full up at the same time, something warm expanding inside your chest. Remembering that person's joy, in this body, when I never felt it myself--it can't help but remind me I'm only sort-of them.
        So I take a minute, wiggle my (Serenas--no, mine) toes and my fingers to ground myself. I concentrate on the sting of scored skin, the way the fluorescent light presses against my eyelids when I close them. That's the stuff of real life, the small discomforts.
        "You shouldn't talk about me like I'm not here," I say, in the vague direction of Evan and the nurse. "'S rude."
        My voice is scratchy, the back of my tongue dry. I blink and look around for a glass of water. The nurse hands one to me, and when I rasp out a "Thanks," Evan looks at me in surprise.
        I'll surmise that Serena Saint wasn't always grateful for being stitched up. Well, he'd better get used to it. This is the new Serena, baby. The new me.
        He waits until the nurse has disappeared off somewhere before he sits beside me and turns a searching gaze on my face. "How you feeling?"
        I shrug. "Dunno," I say, and he does the surprised eyes again.
        "Ree," he says. "There something going on here you're not telling me about? You're acting… different."
        "I feel different," I tell him, and don't get anything except a sceptical look. He leans closer, peering into my eyes, and the penny drops.
        "I'm not on drugs," I add, "if that's what you're thinking. You know I don't touch that shit." It's true, I'm surprised to find, after a quick sift through Serena's memories. Just the odd spliff here or there; as far as she's concerned, that hardly counts. "I like my head to be clear."
        Evan sighs. "Your head hasn't been clear in months."
        I look at him hard. "Well," I say. "It is now." I hold my stare until he meets it, and I couldn't tell you what he sees there. His troubled look doesn't fade away, exactly, but it's joined by something new, something I'm not unhappy to be the cause of.
        "Alright," he says, at last. "Alright. Haven't got a fucking clue why, but I think I might actually believe you."

        I'm not on drugs, and it's when I step onstage a few nights later that I realise why I don't need them. The others are already up there. Jinny and Evan keep up a bare rhythmic pulse; Danny, on the far side of the stage, picks out a few high, silvery notes of lead guitar and lets them hang in the air. The lights are dim, a faint orangey glow that lingers around the corners of the room, like a suggestion of fire over the horizon. I step out into it, and Halloween green paints the backs of my hands, shines in the red of my hair.
        I've woven plastic flowers into it. There was a big tangle of them in the dressing room, all stuck together. I looked online, found earlier pictures of Serena wearing them in the sunshine, looking like some kind of garden sprite, but I guess she hasn't touched them for a while. In the more recent photos, she's dishevelled, and it looks like the only thing she's wearing in her hair is sweat. I picked the mess of flowers apart and put them back on; bought fresh stockings; thumbed gold glitter along my cheekbones.
        I smile. The light on me brightens, turns golden, and there's a moment's silence--punctuated by one premature, nervous scream--before the crowd gives a roar of greeting. Of relief; of joy.
        They give all that energy, and we take hold of it and shape it and build it into beauty. Jinny's drumbeats and Evan's bass provide the foundation, steady and demanding and reassuring all at once. Danny's guitar spins it out into filaments of fire, weaves it into manageable shape. And me? I take hold of it. I grasp it in my hands, I wrap myself in it, and we dance.
        We dance and it's like fighting. We dance and it's like fucking. The crowd, many-limbed beast, holds its hands out to me and I take them. It opens itself to me, and I drink from its veins.
        I drink. I am drunk. I'm dizzy and I am powerful, I'm light and sound and movement; my voice is a weapon and a caress.
        I scream into the wind.

        "Have a look at this." Danny angles his laptop at me.
        We're all in my dressing room. I'm sprawled on the couch, my feet in Evan's lap. Jinny straddles the chair before my dressing table, holding her cold beer bottle against the side of her face, condensation dripping down her cheek. Danny sits on the floor, his back against the side of the sofa.
        "At what?" I say, looking over his shoulder.
        It's our Facebook page. Danny's the social media guy; he set it up. Serena's never checked it on a regular basis. She got too tempted to engage, was always worried that would fuck up the mystique. But I squint at the latest raft of comments, anyway.
        Great gig! Best I've seen them since '16.
        Apollo gig cancelled, but she's better in time for London? Hmm. The North gets shafted once again.
        Serena actually looked like she knew where she was – and wanted to be there!! Great to see her on the mend!!! <3 xoxo
        Too much new material! Remember, some of us have been supporting you since the start. Couldn't fault the performance though, which makes a change.
        I raise an eyebrow. "Turn-up for the books?"
        Danny cranes his neck to look at me. There's something cautious in his eyes, a hope tempered with too many disappointments. "Looks like people love the new you."
        I grin and raise my bottle in salute. (Mineral water. Everybody looks at it, and nobody says a thing.) "Suppose we'd better reschedule Manchester, then?"

        I weave my enchantment on stages the length of the country. We even manage a gig in Paris, and a girl who's ridden the train all the way from Belgium to see us bursts into tears in the front row. When I take her hand across the crush barrier, she glows, incandescent. That the touch of my hand can do that--well. I feel like a saviour.
        I'm clear-eyed and articulate in interviews, and the resulting pieces comment favourably on the difference between now and my manner three months ago. There are internet rumours about a drug problem finally kicked; a bad boyfriend finally ditched. I don't dignify those with a response. My hair catches the light as I shrug and say, "I suppose I just rediscovered my love of music. That's what it's about, you know. Not the myth, none of the stuff I was trying to live up to. That's not life."
        When I'm not on the road, I do laundry. I turn up for band practice bright-eyed and early. I phone my parents every week and pay my council tax on time.
        Serena Saint's life is looking pretty good right now. Soon enough, I'll have to ask her if she wants it back.
        I still sense the vortex, swirling in the depths of me, sometimes. In the dead of the night, the alone-moments before I step onstage, when I can almost imagine that the world out here isn't real at all and I'm back there at that moment, that decision. It's my strength, then, that keeps me afloat. Strength that Serena never had.
        A few more weeks to iron out the kinks. Then Serena Saint can have her life back.

        I'm in a sushi bar in Leeds, of all places, when I feel the pull. The undertow inside of my head that'll soon be all around me, like a hidden current in a river. Nobody else can see it, but I feel it, and it's irresistible.
        Almost.
        If I were still in the ether, the pull would be an inevitability. It wouldn't even occur to me to fight it.
        It doesn't often come while I'm still elbow-deep in somebody's life. I suppose whatever-it-is that gives these second chances doesn't like to leave a job unfinished. Now that I'm here, now that I'm Serena, I've got substance. Something to dig my fingers into and anchor myself.
        So, I do. I wrap Serena's memories in a death grip. I don't want to leave our girl still teetering on the edge.
        It's an effort, and it must show on my face because Jinny drops her avocado maki and squints at me. "Ree?" she says. "You alright?"
        I press my lips together and nod. Jinny still looks worried.
        "I told you not to have the tuna," she says.
        I don't grace that with a reply. I close my eyes. It's like screwing my insides up into a ball, trying to hold on; so tight I might compress into something new, not-me and not-Serena either.
        No, I say, to the grasping hands of fate. You can fuck right off. No.
        Inch by inch, the feeling recedes. I open my eyes to Jinny, who's still regarding me with open concern. "Are you gonna puke?" she says.
        "Nah." I swig the last of my free-refills green tea and hop down off my stool. "I'm fine. Let's pay up; we're gonna be late for soundcheck."

        And oh, for that to be the end of it. Fate's a tricky bastard, though; it'll get you there, by one roundabout means or another.
        We're halfway through soundchecking our second track when it starts. Or, well, most of us are; Evan's mostly having a gesticulated argument about levels with the sound guy across the empty hall. I open my mouth to go for the high note, and it's like something smacks me on the back of the head. Sparks burst into my field of vision, and my voice sticks in my throat.
        Then--I'm somewhere else.
        No luck, again. Simon leans against the bus stop glass and loosens his tie. It's pissing down, and his feet squelch in his shoes. What do you expect for twelve quid from Primark, but he can't afford to replace them.
        It isn't the people in the Jobcentre that bother him--though that Mick is as patronising a little jobsworth as he's ever had the misfortune to meet. The way they look at him, like he just needs to pull his socks up, really try--well, he doesn't give a shit what they think.
        The kids, though. It's little things--like the fact that Aisha has to go to school with her sandwiches in a carrier bag. He sees her looking at the other kids, their bright macs and shiny wellies, their lunchboxes with dinosaurs and princesses and superheroes on them. She's already learned not to ask, though.
        Leila's not old enough to understand. She asks, constantly. Not for stuff--mostly, ‘when's Mummy coming home?'
        He can't think about Callie, not anymore. Holding her hand in the hospital, watching her fade before his eyes, and fucking shaking with anger. Not even at the world, or the cancer--at her. For leaving, for not fighting harder, for the brief flicker of peace that crossed her eyes when the doctors told her the gig was up, for--he doesn't even know what for, really. Which is as it should be. There is no what for. What kind of sicko resents his wife for dying?
        What kind of person is he? What kind of dad? How much longer can he hold it together?
        Callie's mum and dad love the girls. And the girls love being at their house, always cheer up a little when they arrive. They'd be better off there, Si thinks. Better off without him.
        "Serena! Ree, you with me?"
        Evan's shaking my shoulder. He's leaning over me, his face right in mine, and I realise I'm on the floor.
        I cough, suck in air. "Yeah," I get out. "Yeah, I'm with you. What happened?"
        "Search me. We thought you were having a fit."
        I take the hand he offers to help me to my feet. "I just need some water," I say. "I'll be fine."
        But I know what it is. It's fate, giving me a picture show. Working to persuade me someone else's need is greater. Normally, there's a gap between lives, that blank space where I don't think or exist, but this feels urgent. Like it can't wait for me to finish with Serena.
        I swig water, take a break, head back to the dressing room. I've got rid of Serena's old habit of wallpapering it with the dead. I've got my lyrics, a book of poetry (not Plath), my notebooks. I use this space to create in, not to destroy.
        The scars on my arms are fading. They're pink now; they'll be white before too long.
        I watch my face in the mirror. The clear green eyes, the thoughtful set of the mouth. The way it comes to fierce life when I sing. I like this face. I like this girl. I don't want to succumb to it, this idea that one life is worth more than another.
        But I can feel the pull again, and this time it's stronger.
        The names of Si's kids--they tug at something inside me that doesn't quite belong to this me. It isn't Serena. I can feel him bleeding into me, like somebody's poked pinholes in my skin, and left my being porous.
        This is me. I know that, really. Not Serena; not Simon, either. The place where they meet. The borderline, the gap, the selfless place. I'm never an original--or anyway, I can't remember when I was. I'm always a second chance.
        Where's my second chance? is what I want to say. To snap back at the pull of another life.
        I think I know, though, really. My second chance is gonna come when I fight back hard enough to hold on. When I'm self enough to be solid, to be anchored. I thought this might be it--but maybe Serena never had substance enough for that. I've built her out of memories, scraps of knowledge gleaned from blog posts and magazine interviews--but what is she, really?
        Not today. Not this time.
        The pull is stronger now, like mountaintop wind. I close my eyes. I decide.
        Welcome to the 27 Club, Serena Saint.
       
        Hidden Track
        "So, Serena--I have to admit, you had us worried for a little while."
        She half-smiles. "…Sorry?"
        "But over the last year, you really seem to have gotten your life on track. The fans, the reviewers, even your bandmates have commented that it was a pretty sudden change. What prompted it?"
        Saint's large, expressive eyes turn thoughtful. She talks about this slowly, without the tumult of enthusiasm that greeted questions about the new album. Uh-oh, I'm starting to think, I've picked the wrong topic, interview over. But no, she's just choosing her words carefully.
        "More than one person has said that to me," she says. "That I pulled myself together about a year ago. I wouldn't go that far. It's always a work in progress, you know? You don't just… flick a switch. But the really funny thing is, I don't really feel as though I made the decision until about three months after that. The period beforehand--it's hard for me to remember, even now. I almost feel as though I wasn't there? It's hard to explain. As though someone else was in my mind, making my decisions for me."
        She breaks off with a self-deprecating laugh.
        "I know it sounds mental," she says. "Perhaps I was mental--we haven't really determined that yet. But anyway, when I snapped out of it? I decided I wasn't going back there, not if I could possibly avoid it. No more drinking, and I was going to get help. I was going to stay in control of my own mind." She shrugs. "I suppose I just wanted my life back."