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.
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