**The Forgotten Tongue**

Lena awoke to the pale light filtering through the curtains, her head heavy with the residue of an unusually deep sleep. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and sat up in bed, the soft sheets bunched around her waist. The familiar sights of her bedroom greeted her: the old oak dresser, the mirror with a crack in the corner, the worn rug her grandmother had given her years ago. Everything was the same, yet something felt different.

Lena opened her mouth to yawn and found herself uttering a strange sound—something she didn't recognize. The noise echoed in the quiet room, alien and unnerving. Frowning, she tried to speak again, but the words that came out were an unintelligible string of syllables, smooth and flowing, like a river of sounds she didn’t understand.

Panic prickled at the edge of her consciousness. She was awake, wasn't she? This wasn’t some vivid dream? She reached for her phone on the bedside table, her hands trembling. She needed to call someone, anyone, to help make sense of this. But as she tried to say her sister’s name, the foreign language spilled out again, silky and incomprehensible.

Her breath caught in her throat as she struggled to recall the simplest word in her native tongue. She grasped at familiar phrases, common expressions she used every day, but nothing came. The language she had spoken her entire life was gone, vanished from her mind as if it had never existed. Instead, this new language—its sounds strangely beautiful, yet terrifyingly unfamiliar—had taken its place.

Lena jumped out of bed, her heart pounding. She ran to the mirror and stared at her reflection, as if searching for clues in her own eyes. Who was she if she couldn’t speak her own language? Her identity felt as fragile as a thin sheet of ice, cracking under the weight of this sudden change.

Desperation driving her, Lena grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, determined to write something—anything—in her mother tongue. But the moment the pen touched the paper, her hand moved on its own, the symbols that emerged entirely foreign. They swirled and curved across the page in a script she had never seen before, yet somehow, she understood it perfectly.

She slumped against the wall, her thoughts racing. What had happened to her? How could she know this language, yet forget the one she had known since childhood? The room felt colder, the silence pressing in on her from all sides.

In a daze, Lena wandered into the living room, where books lined the shelves—novels, poetry, history, all in her native language. She reached for one, flipping it open, but the letters blurred before her eyes, turning into gibberish. Tears welled up as she realized she couldn’t read a single word. The language that had once been hers, the words that had shaped her world, were now meaningless.

As the day wore on, Lena tried to communicate with the outside world. Text messages came out wrong, and phone calls ended in confusion. Her friends and family didn’t understand her, couldn’t help her, and she felt more isolated than ever before.

By nightfall, Lena sat alone in the darkness, the weight of her loss pressing down on her. She was fluent in a language she had never learned, yet completely lost in the world she had once known. The day had stolen something irreplaceable from her, leaving her adrift in a sea of unfamiliarity. The person she had been was gone, replaced by someone she didn’t recognize, speaking a language she didn’t understand.