There is a woman who is deeply important to me, but I cannot recall why or how. I know not if she is friend, sister, lover, or aunt. When she is present I can remember all of these things. When she is absent I quickly forget she even exists or that we ever met unless something reminds me.

  She appears when I ring a bell and disappears an hour or two ter. An amount of time must pass before ringing a bell is capable of bringing her back. Wherever it is she goes when she is not here, there is no food or water there, and so I must provide that for her during her brief returns. I think it is another world or pne of existence that she keeps being ripped away to. I know she has told me details, but I can never remember them when she is not here. She is somehow metaphysically entangled with the concept of “twilight” and how it is a brief transitional period that heralds an ending.

  It was not always this way. I know that she first started disappearing at the same time many other people, myself included, underwent a spontaneous and seemingly magical change. For most of us the change was a physical one, often a retively subtle one that brought us closer to alignment with our ideal self. Or often enough, not so subtle. Many people were outed as trans because of it. In one notable case that I know of, a young girl less than ten became a musclebound dwarven man with a giant beard. He definitely prefers this new body, but his personality, interests, and fashion sense remains unchanged.

  The tying of these changes to the sound of bells is not unique to the woman I can hardly remember. For some of us, the sound of a bell is required to maintain the change. For others it is a trigger for toggling the change on and off. For some it is any bell, and for others it has to be a specific bell or a specific tone or rung under the right circumstances or by the right person.

  If not for this shared thread of bells, the woman I care about but cannot recall would likely have long since perished by now. The first few times I summoned her back to this world were by accident when ringing a bell for myself or another. The second or third time she returned she was sobbing, terrified, and begging for food and water on the brink of death. These days I have multiple arms set to make sure I summon her every day, even if I start to forget why.