She found herself now in the passenger seat of a car at night. To her left there was a man driving her down a dark, winding road. She looked out of her window and saw a cliff with a wooded valley stretching down, before rising back up in another mountain, illuminated by the full moon. She turned to her left and looked at the man more closely. It was hard to make out his features as he was only lit by a few lights on the dash. However, even though she could see very little, she thought she recognized the man. She reached for the lights in the car.

 “Don’t.” He said, not taking his eyes off the road.

 “And why not?” She answered.

 “You will change my form, make me something different.”

 “I don’t have the power to do that.”

 “You’re the only one with power here. Ever since you made that wish to go home you’ve been exploring these worlds. They are your mind.”

 “But I can’t change you. Perhaps this is all my subconscious, but no action of mine gives you any form.”

 “You can see me now only because you have an expectation of seeing me. I am formed as a man here because you see me as a man. If you saw me as a woman, I would be a woman. Me? Well I have no real say in this matter, nor any real opinion. I am only a being of the expectations projected upon me. Because of this manner of existence, there is no true body or identity for me to latch onto. Perhaps there is a soul, but the soul is unable to affect the world without either having a name or body. Because you give me both, I have no agency. You may touch my arm now, and you will feel something, but that is only because you expect to feel something there. You expect that if you touch what you assume to be flesh you will get flesh back. So then now what do you think happens when you are no longer there? What do you think I feel when it is just myself, adrift in space. There is no body for me to feel with, there is no identity for which to associate with. I am the soul, filled with emotion yet unfeeling to the world around me. I have long since accepted that this is the way things must be. But here, in this dark, you perceive me just enough to give me a form, but not enough to make me something I don’t want to be. If you turn on that light, then you will force me to become something concrete, and that can never be taken away.”

 Never once during his whole soliloquy did he take his eyes off of the winding road. He talked in a soft voice, unnaturally so. It sounded as if his voice was missing something. After a period of silence he spoke again, in the same soft tone, but much quieter.

 “Truthfully, I hate you. Deep down, among all of those feelings which I push down, I despise you. I would crash this car and kill the both of us if I could.”

 “And what ‘expectation’ of mine causes you to not.”

 “The expectation to be good.”

 For some reason unknown to her, she seemed to have an equal amount of hatred for him as he had for her. Regardless, she couldn’t understand why he hated her. Though she had some vague memory or familiarity with the man across from her, she didn’t know him well enough for him to have such strong feelings against her, nor had she been outgoing enough in her life to cause someone she didn’t know to hate her. As they drove, she ran her fingers along the sewing of the faux leather car seats, feeling the ridges of the thread underneath her fingertips. They continued like this for a long time, the noise of the car rolling across the somewhat-maintained mountain road the only thing they could hear. She wondered if the car would run out of gas, and if they would have to find a place to purchase some. It seemed impossible, especially given how this road seemed to never end. She remembered though, what the man next to her had mentioned. If this was in her mind, then perhaps it didn’t matter. All she had to do was to will the car to have fuel again, or better yet, not even consume fuel.

 “What makes you feel like you can talk so authoritatively about me anyways.” She asked.

 “Well I am right, am I not? Either way, I know you pretty well. Even when you try to obscure me with lights and smoke, I’ll still be there.”

 “So you’re a stalker.”

 “Insofar as someone can stalk themselves, yes. Just remember that no matter where you go, I’ll always be there.”

 “You’re a creep.”

 “Likewise.” he concluded with a chuckle.

 As she turned the words he said around in her head, a question formed. She opened her mouth multiple times to try and vocalize it, but every time she thought she found the right words, she couldn’t push the air out of her lungs.

 “Just ask your question. I can read your mind anyways.” He suddenly interjected.

 “Creep.” she responded. “How do you know what I am thinking anyways?”

 “Well to answer both your questions: I am you. The original you that you discarded.”

 His remark seemed to stir a thought within her. If he could read her mind, then couldn’t she read his? How come he knew things she didn’t? She decided to try and remember a time before she traveled these worlds. She saw flashes of the past in her mind. At first it was her birth, or maybe how someone described her birth to her, then it was that lonely night where she wandered the streets of a city, and where some vague emotion compelled her to wish. Between those two points, the memories slowly began to fill in. She remembered being the man in the driver's seat. She recalled one of the many times she looked into the mirror, and saw her reflection start to take form before she stopped herself.

 “Why aren’t you stopping me?” She thought in her head.

 “Even if it means that my physical form is cemented in place, you deserve to have your own memories.” She naturally understood what his response was without him having to say a word.

 “Even if you can read my mind now, I prefer a spoken conversation. The process of speaking helps solidify thoughts into something definite.” He suddenly stated aloud. She hummed in response. “Yes, that too is fine.” He responded.

 Her memories slowly started to fill in more and more. For some reason, she initially thought pity, she refused to look back on who she used to look like. As she remembered what she once was, she started to empathise more with the plight of the man to her left. When she was split in half, he got the short end of the stick, did he not? Without thinking, she reached out to touch his arm. As he stated, she felt something resembling flesh. However, its boundaries were not well-defined. She could not tell which part of his arm she was touching. His skin felt inconsistent. It was smooth sometimes, but when she moved her hand somewhere else and then came back, it was suddenly rough. When she tried to grab his right hand, she instead felt a tangle of fingers. There was no concrete part of his body she could hold on to. Because of that, she retracted her hand.

 After that, they returned back to how they were before. They did not touch. They did not talk. They simply absorbed the sounds of driving. She thought that it was not an awkward silence between them, more like that there was nothing they had to say at the moment. However, he eventually spoke up in a quiet voice.

 “I just want to know one thing. I know it will probably never go away, but does that feeling of being someone fake ever go away?”

 “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t really feel that way.”

 “That’s,” he caught himself briefly, “that’s good to hear.”

 At some point along the winding road he abruptly pulled into a space on the side of the road. She could not tell if there was anything unique about this pullout compared to all of the others they had passed, but he motioned for her to exit the car.

 “This is our stop.”

 They both exited the car and looked up to the sky. There, she saw the moon. She immediately noticed that its shape in the sky was like a teardrop rather than a circle. Upon closer inspection, she realized it was breaking apart.

 “This moon has gone past its Roche limit. For that transgression, it is now breaking apart. It will soon rain down upon this world and become one with it, so maybe it isn’t so bad.” He said, taking steps toward her. The closer he got, the more the teardrop shape of the moon elongated, breaking apart with more and more force. Eventually he walked behind her and placed his arms around her shoulders, leaning on her. “I don’t think I hate you,” he admitted in a quiet voice. They continued to watch as the moon finally broke apart into a white streak across the sky. Finally, she saw the fragments of the moon dissipate into the night sky.