IN MY MEMORIES, MY EYES are always green.
     As green as the dark and dangerous sea, my grandfather used to say. Mermaid’s eyes, he called them. Eyes that changed, from the color of seaweed, to sea glass, to the green of troubled water. Yet I was never troubled, when my eyes were green.
     There are huge gaps of time, years, when I don’t remember anything about my life. Still, I am quite convinced that my eyes were always green.
     Even in my double memories, they are green. Even though I seem to remember being two people, they are green. It doesn’t matter if I recall being a child with blond streaks in my braids, collecting shells with my grandfather at the stony edge of the sea, or if I think I was a dark-haired child riding a new pony, under the watchful eye of my pretty mother. My eyes are always green.
     These days the mirror tells me my eyes are not green. They are brown. As brown as leaves that die in the fall.
     I’m writing down these words because I don’t know if tomorrow I will remember what I know today. I have too many memories. Like the memory of my eyes. But I also have memory losses. Great chunks of time are missing. Frankly, I’m terrified of losing more pieces of myself, no matter how small.
     “Green eyes are a false memory, Tennyson,” according to Dr. Embry. “You never had green eyes.”
     His words interrupted my mental rambling. His specialty is memory loss and recovery. And apparently—me. Giles Embry is the head of “the Campus,” the facility where I am lodged. He is both a scientist and a medical doctor.
     He studies disorders of the brain.
     It seems I possess one of those pesky disordered brains. But why would I have false memories? How could they have taken root?
     The first time I saw a stranger with brown eyes staring back at me in the mirror, I shrieked. It was the wrong reaction. Dr. Embry took away all the mirrors for a week. I learned not to react. I learned to stop flinching at the unfamiliar eyes reflected there.
     But my eyes are not all that’s changed. Something happened to my hair.
     When did it become so dark, so brown, so short? I often reach for my hair, my blond hair, to braid it, to put it up, to brush it. My locks barely reach below my ears. Someone cut it. I don’t know why.
     When I steel myself to look in the mirror, my facial features are similar to the ones I remember, but I can’t be positive, because of the brown eyes and the short dark hair. I try not to look into mirrors for very long anymore.
     Men used to call me beautiful. Or did they? I suppose that could be a false memory too.
     Dr. Embry tells me certain memories have been implanted, changed, and distorted. Perhaps an aftereffect of the accident.
     From what he has told me, even if I could be sure of who I am, I could never trust my memory. Our memories are fluid. They change. We start editing them as soon as they are completed. We make them better, more interesting. We lace things together so they make a story out of the puzzle of our lives. We crave stories that have meaning.
     But my memory is a hopeless liar and I am broken into pieces.
     When I’m awake, people call me Tennyson.
     In my dreams, I hear voices calling me Marissa.