A New Short Story I Probably Won't Finish

I started a new short story yesterday morning with my mocha but didn't finish...

A white blanket of fog hangs over half the city-town, hiding and disguising it. My stomach timidly rumbles as I wake up, making its customary morning lament. I only wish I could ignore it and all my daily responsibilities that fall through my mind as I lay in bed, waiting for the motivation to drag myself up and awake.
I had once had a different life and sometimes in the early morning before I have full control of my thoughts or late at night when I'm too fatigued to hold them back, memories of my other life come flooding back. When we're children we learn in science class about all those terrible effects of the earth: tectonic plates shifting, monstrous waves emitting from the ocean to swallow whole towns, furious winds moving in a circle like a crazed, jealous husband, but they never teach you about the more treacherous calamities that sit in your own head and heart.  Usually my thoughts capture me at home, but it's even happened to me in public a few times. Once I was at a bar restaurant standing next to my best friend, looking at her friends sitting at a table as they casually and gracefully ate and talked. The song that was playing changed to a different song, one from my past life, and sadness gripped my chest as a single memory from my old life came flooding back. At first I tried to deny it, ignore it, but of course it was useless. The only thought that came to my head, a rather customary thought of mine, was: escape. My nerves came up to the edges of my skin and I tried to make them calm down as I asked if we could go somewhere else, somewhere...different...less crowded maybe.
We left but by then the sentiment had taken full root and all I could do was be carried by it. We came to a second place but I had to make my apologies and bail. Run. The song still played in my head even though we were many moments gone from the first place. I left my friend and his friends. I got into my cold, winter-bitten car, finding no warmth anywhere. Turning on the engine, rotating my key into its socket, I tried to collapse the memory the song evoked in my head.  Instead of a blank mind I received the only warmth I would get then, fresh warm tears sliding down my icy cheeks.
I drove through the darkened streets, nothing on my mind but the reverberations of the memory from the song. I wanted to go home but I remembered I had left home and I was visiting here. I could go to my rented room, turn the heater up as high as it would go, and fall into this overwhelming nostalgia. Or I could fight it. But I had tried that before and I always lost.
Or...
I could plan my escape.

Rainy Season

The rainy season has started.  I love that time when you go out after a good bout of rain and the streets are pretty much deserted and you feel like the only person in existence. I also enjoy curling up under bed covers with a good novel in the middle of the afternoon as the rain plays about your windows, the grass, and everything else that remains uncovered.

That's all.

The Other Day...

The other day I woke up to lack of water (not too unusual) and the power cut out for about an hour (also not too unusual).  Then I was walking home in the middle of the day up my two back alleys when a man came up and tried his best to grope me.  I understand that walking home alone past 9pm is risky, but midday, really?  I attempted to hit him as best I could while yelling as many vicious things as I could in English.  He ran away.  I felt defeated and upset but at least a little, I don't really know the word for this, it's not proud, but I did feel like I put up a fight. 

This story is my roundabout way of saying that life is the unexpected and our way of dealing with it.  With all the planning we do, all our thoughts, all that we hope to be, and all that we try to achieve, there is still that one thing that tends to get in the way: life.  I should know this by now - I have been through enough unforeseen circumstances and have heard and read enough to know that the things that test us the most are the things we never really saw coming.  Sometimes these things are great - like falling in love.  Whoever plans to fall in love?!  It just happens and it's a mini-miracle (or a big one depending on the person and the circumstances), but of course there is the flipside where there are the negative things that come and leave their scars on our hearts and souls and whatever makes us breathe and believe. 

But how we react initially and in the long run really determines who we are.  There are times when we just want to sink into sadness, when there is an overwhelming gulf that threatens to overtake us (and it does), and there are times when our strength prevails and we fight with an endurance inside us we never knew we possessed.  I remember so many times just wanting to give up, just thinking that I had fought enough and all I needed now was rest but that for some reason, either problems didn't come or I had more fight in me than I believed.  I think that all of us have more fight in us that we think and I think all of us have this desire to be more (whether we actualize it or not...).  Life comes and we struggle and we flourish, but always there is us...fighting...surviving...sometimes losing...always learning even if we don't really want to...