Thursday, May 31, 2012

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.

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