"She will be remembered."

Rachel staggers backwards and bends over in pain as the tip of Gillian’s blade lands in her belly to secure the first two sets, 6-2, 7-5. No actual blood, and no injury – just a brief red glow at the impact point on her bodysuit – but a gruelling reminder that she is up against a superior opponent. I contemplate again how this works: ‘anima’. So, neither of them had, in actual fact, ever held a sword in their lives. Gillian, with her classically feminine curves but not of the firm type to give athleticism, you couldn’t imagine running a 10k at much of a pace if at all. Yet here she is, so far outplaying her opponent with fluidity and grace. Befitting the number one seed. Befitting a female who has had what I deem to be the biggest sensual influence on my whole life, even though I never got to so much as date her.

Gillian and Rachel both had very vivid dreams yesterday, meaning 1995 and 2017 respectively, which went something like this...

A ‘Gillian Kelly’, library assistant in somewhere called Stowcaster, England, at age 20. Her virginal copper-haired looks and figure that resembled a Botticelli painting, except with glasses and a tight skirt and blouse, had attracted one young man in particular, about her age. This ‘Philip’ kept coming in there but always being too shy to say anything. After weeks of this, eventually he did, along with presenting her with a bunch of flowers. She politely declined them, explaining she already had a boyfriend. He was devastated, and he remembered it for the rest of his life. Meanwhile she got on with hers, until one day at age 25 in the 1995 whilst she thought she was safe in her own bed, found that she had woken up into a strange clinical little room, with an extremely unfamiliar view out its window.

For the other, a ‘Rachel Tomes’, having a respectable career in the year 2017 as a school guidance counsellor in somewhere called Stowcaster, England, married to a chemist husband with whom she had 3 daughters. Being the good mother she was, she got them piano lessons, and Philip, a 45-year-old freelance guy they’d vetted off his concerts website came to their home most weeks for about 4 years. He got to know them very well, and he liked the 3 girls as well as her, in a ‘fuller’ way than they knew. It all ended when one day he tearfully admitted a colossal scandal to her and her husband, which they comforted him over before parting ways. A few months later, whilst individually pottering around at home, she and her daughters found that they’d woken up in a haze of white into similar, separate, rooms.