Double Memories

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Double Memories and Hanz

    I started having recollections of my own, but they were strange, double exposed, and near nonsensical in the context of what Erik told me. The first really clear flashback I had of that lifetime was on a stage, but I wasn't singing, and it sure as hell wasn't in La Palaise de Garnier. In fact, I was standing on a catwalk as I watched a scene play out below. A little man was looking along the edge of the stage, checking something (I couldn't tell what), I saw a shadow moving in the background. He shouted for someone to "drop it" and then the chain weighted curtain dropped straight onto his head. Erik rushed down to see if his friend was okay, and naturally, apart from a splitting headache, he was. During the conversation, Erik called him both "Hanz" and by his nickname, "Bougie". (This, in French, means 'candle', a common method of illuminating the stage in days of old. It is also very close to the verb "to move" an indication of his hyper activity. I knew none of this at the time.)
    I had a mental conversation with Hanz, who said that he and Erik owned a smaller Opera in Paris, and that at the time, there were a good number of them, as opera was a very fashionable pastime. He asserted that Erik did, in fact, give me lessons, and that I did sing at the Paris Opera, but that Erik lived in a flat like any other normal person in Paris. He couldn't speak for the scene in which Erik was killed, but assured me that in his memory, I killed myself.
    I, however, remembered two scenarios surrounding this. In the first scenario Erik was poisoned, and I ran into our herbal apothecary to get an antidote, and when I returned, I found him cut into several pieces on the ground. I drowned myself as a consequence of blaming myself for his death. In the other (which I believe, because of it's incomprehensibility, is less likely to be a product of my imagination) Erik was dismembered in front of me, I was raped by his assailant, and then... I don't really recall, except that my senses were spinning out of control, and I had the sense both of euphoria and of dying. I figured that I must have injected myself with an overdose of morphine... though I don't have any recollection of injecting myself with anything, and every scenario that I cooked up to explain how I might have gone about overdosing myself fell apart, didn't fit, or felt just wrong. I chalked it up to the haze of another incarnation obscuring my view, and left it be for a while.