The first rule, always, is to be grounded. So our feet, we planted on the floor, each one of us seated in our most comfortable positions. Our heads we kept bowed and our eyes, closed, as the lights of the classroom dimmed and the music - a classical piece; gentle, saccharine - poured out of the speakers, an accompaniment to the heartbeats and breaths that held most of our focus. Each beat and rhythm an anchor to the present; a tether that held us to reality.

And what a reality it was.

Peak of the semester and with a glance, anyone could tell. We were down to half the size of the class, and a quarter left of the hour before it would all come crushing down: the stress and hustle of being a day away from one of the semester's biggest assignment deadlines. The reality of which loomed, casting its shadow over us.

The music rose gently to a crescendo, before the chords turned delicate once again and were met with the soft notes of a woman's voice. Hushed, her voice drew out each word carefully, purposefully, as if she was testing the fit of them in the music. It took a moment for me to register the words for what they were: a set of instructions to construct a scene that would then in our minds' eyes, be set into motion.

As I took in the words, I saw it: a dreamscape, crafted from the words spoken by another.

As mines took form, I saw in it a girl sitting lone on the floor, cross legged and shoulders slumped, staring mutely at a point in the distance. Reality had cast a wide shadow, for here, too, it lurked: in the depths of a pair of brown eyes, set downcast and lacklustre. Across from her, a door stood closed, but the room the girl sat in was otherwise empty. 

Or rather, the room I sat in was otherwise empty. Because that was me, in this mind's story. A girl sitting lone in an empty room, looking for the world the way I had, at that moment in reality, felt: weary, and losing much, save for a little bit, of hope.

It was almost laughable then, that this sliver of borrowed time in a world imagined became the moment that we met.

In the dreamscape, the door across from the imagined me slowly swung open - not because I had wished it to, but because the woman's voice, woven so intricately in the music, had asked of it and my mind made it so - and emerging from behind it was yet another girl; one who was so jarringly different from the first. In place of burdened shoulders, there was a lightness to hers; a sort of ease in the steps she took as she slowly made her approach; and hope - so much hope - in the familiar-

I started, and shifted in my seat. 

I wasn't alone in my hesitation; I could feel the rest of the class stirring, too; could hear the sharp intakes of breath in between wary sighs. 'Familiar', said the voice in the music and the word stood out from it, as if it had been plucked from the recesses of their shared notes and had been left to hang in the air, in the same way that I had been pulled out of the envisioned moment to take its notice. My breath caught in my throat as the word and its implications sank in. I gave myself a moment to settle my breathing before allowing myself to focus once more: feet on floor and eyes closed, breaths and beats, music and voice -

-deep set brown eyes; those I had seen not but a while ago. And though they bore in them little trace of a previously lingering shadow, I knew that they belonged to the same person.

This girl, I realised a beat later, was me, too. 
Another me; another self. 

In my mind's eye, I was seeing two versions of myself. Two girls who were one and the same and yet entirely different. I watched, tense, as the meeting unfolded.

And the way she had felt, she didn't need to say, because from the moment she sat, I felt it too: a sense of calm, a steady assurance, a burgeoning hopefulness.

Calm. Assured. Hopeful. 

These were the girl's feelings that she so blatantly felt and had so strongly radiated in her presence. And like the swirling eddies of water from a dropped pebble, they spread. Like pulsing, living things, they crossed over from one self to the other. I felt it all then - in the dreamscape, where my imagined self was sitting next to her, and in reality, as the feelings burst forth through the music and through the voice, through counted beats and breaths and closed eyes and feet on floor-

and I exhaled, at the same time liberated and overcame by the force of them coming up all at once. My breath came out a sigh - of relief, of gratitude, of marvel for the possibilities held in the things that were unravelling in this span of borrowed time. 

"And when you look at them, you know that everything will be alright," said the woman's voice in the music and it's in hearing her - actually hearing her - that the reality of the moment hit me. My mind reeled with it: with the shifts taking place between reality and the dreamscape; the shifts taking place between the self I was then and the older self I had come to meet; and - suddenly, vividly, my heart dropping from the sudden crushing weight of it - with the realisation that these feelings could possibly be only as real as this meeting was. Neither were real-

And yet.
And yet.

My imagined self turned to look at the older girl. And when our eyes met, I beheld in them what I knew even then, and what I know more than ever now: that all of this was true. This moment, this meeting, this promise may not be real but they were, in their shifting and their unravelling and their becoming, true as anything else can be. And the feelings that had stirred within me and had flooded into the very veins of me like a reservoir of emotions barrelling forth through the walls of a dam broken and burst - they were true, too.

The gravity of the moment settled between us like the words of our unspoken promise. So we sat there, the imagined selves of the then me and the future me, in the comfortable silence of each other's company for some time. One looking heart, joined by the company of another.

We stayed that way until the voice in the music broke through the calm of our shared space and in its measured, sweet cadence told us that it was time for our older selves to leave. And in the same quiet way that she had first come in, the older and other self of mines stood up at the cue of the woman's voice. By the motions of the mind's doing, she took one last look at the self I was then and offered a knowing smile, before walking towards and out of the door, letting it click shut behind her.

The sound was amplified in the otherwise empty room and could have easily severed through the foggy realities of the moment and register with harsh-edged finality in the mind of the girl sitting on the floor alone in the wake of the other's leaving.

But it didn't.

For the last time, the music rose into a crescendo and the voice it carried in it melted away. In gradual sparse chords, the music itself, too, receded into an encompassing silence. Heartbeats calmed and were left uncounted, breaths came in and out without the sharpness of focus. Lights were turned back on while feet and bodies in their seats, shifted. And finally eyes came fluttering open, taking all of this in. 

But not even then, with my returning back to the reality in where I had been grounded, was I struck with the sense of finality. Not even then, did the meeting, for me, end. 

Because our meeting had yet to have even begun; only doing so in the time that then followed. A few weeks ahead in the future, I had mused once upon a time; in an imagined reality and a dreamscape crafted by the mind, the day before one of the semester's biggest assignment deadlines. 

Those few weeks, as it turned out, came along soon after to greet me; bringing with them the promise we had once, in our shared silence, made: to hold on to the calm, the assurance, the hope. And that when the time comes, these will be the mark of her foreseen return where we will, in this wondrous reality of ours, meet again. 

We will meet again.

And so we did.

---