“What do you want to go to London for?” The girl’s mother asked her.
The girl looked up at the woman who raised her, her face blurry. The room they were in was the dining room that the girl had known all her life. So many memories were in this room. Just a month ago they celebrated her birthday here with friends and family.
However, she found it difficult recalling any of them now. In fact, she found it difficult to focus on the room itself.
“There are some good universities a little closer to home.” Her mother was saying.
“But I’ve always wanted to live there, and my friends are all going there too.” The girl found herself saying. The words just seemed to come out. They flowed unbidden from her as she watched from somewhere in the back of her mind.
“It’s not all that great, honestly. I was there for five years, and I wanted to leave almost straight away.” Her mother told her. “Really, you’d be better off going to Grenvarden.”
The girl felt herself rolling her eyes. She turned away from her mother and the room faded from view.
Whirls of color shifted in its absence. They melded and parted to reveal other places and people. Objects and faces blended in a torrent before things settled into a new place.
“I don’t think the dorms would allow that.” The young woman’s friend told her. She was looking at a big neon sign for sale in a large thrifty store. “We’d have to drill a few holes in the wall and there's no way they’d like that.”
“That sucks. Why do they have to be so strict? We’re going to be here for a few years. What’s wrong with spicing our room up a little?” The young woman moaned. Once again, the words felt distant, as if she were hearing them through a recording. The store they stood in wasn’t in focus except for the table they were looking at. When they moved on to the next items on display the focus followed them, leaving the neon sign and the table it was on to fade from view.
“I hear you.” Her friend nodded along in commiseration. “Hey, you hungry? I’m starved.”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t see anything worthwhile to buy anyway.”
“Cool. Wanna head to Grenvarden’s? I’ve been craving their chicken salad lately.” The young woman’s friend said. She found herself nodding in agreement, and yet, inside she felt a little confused. She couldn’t say why, though. She looked at her friend but couldn’t really make out her features.
The scene collapsed into the same torrent of colors as before. Places flashed by, familiar places, and the people in them sparked a feeling of recognition. It was all fleeting. The colors settled and a new scene unfurled.
The lecture hall was slowly emptying. The professor was packing his suitcase. The students were taking their sweet time leaving. Some were getting started on an assignment, making notes for later. Others were huddled together and chatting.
“...two weeks... I wanna go to the beach. I want the break to start now.”
“Then it would finish early.”
“They should make it longer then.”
“I would like that too, but damn do you sound lazy.”
A young woman was sitting and writing some notes down. She was a little behind with her work and a friend was letting her read from her notebook. Meanwhile, her friends were talking about the upcoming break.
“I wanna go to the beach.” Friend one, said.
“You’ve said that.” Replied friend two.
“I’ll say it again... I wanna go to the beach.”
“Then make a plan. We’ve got two weeks. Where’re we going? When do we go? Do you even have money?”
“... I wanna go to the beach.”
“This bitch.”
“Girls.” The young woman who was working said. “Trying to concentrate here.”
“Hey, isn’t your hometown close to the sea?”
“...yeah. About a half hours drive.” She replied, not looking up from her work.
“That... sounds doable. Should we take a stop at Bel Vard to say hi to your family, before heading to an air BnB at... what was the place called again?” Friend two asked.
“...” The young woman opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn’t recall. Her mind just suddenly found it difficult to think of the name.
“Wasn’t it called Grenvarden? I looked at it on google maps. It’s super close to Bel Vard.” Friend one exclaimed.
The young woman looked up at her friends. She felt odd. She couldn’t pin down the feeling, but there was something strange about this moment. She tried to search her friends’ faces but couldn’t find anything. Even their appearances were fleeting from her memory.
Once again, the world around her fell to pieces in shifting color and sound. Flashes of people's faces flew by her. For impossibly short moments they stood before her in such clarity. A woman smiled at her, tears in her eyes. Her mother on the day she left home. A man, her father, held her face tenderly as he got one good look at her before letting her go. Her friend who came with her to London. She looked at her with a cheeky smile as they rode the train. More faces flashed by, and she felt like she could only just remember bits and pieces about each. Men and women, old and young. She knew them. She was sure of it.
All of it burned away. A land of shadows and dappled light replaced the cascade of past echoes. She stood in a place far removed from the world and saw only darkness. A darkness with faint lights above, the softest of starlight, and moving murkiness at her feet.
From the murkiness came the shape of someone. A man, his features difficult to make out. He faced her from afar, but she could not tell if he could see her. She watched him and felt herself fading.
----------------------------------------
The boy lay in bed and listened to the crying.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
It was past his bedtime; the light was off, and he was under the covers. And yet, his mother was downstairs sitting in the living room and weeping.
The noise was keeping him from sleeping. He simply lay there, not knowing what to do, or what to think. He stared at the ceiling and tried to make out the various details in the darkened room.
This wasn’t new.
Every now and then he would be caught in the awkward moment of listening to his mother crying. He had long since become numb to it. It seemed that, after a while, comforting her amounted to nothing. She would always have these bouts.
His father left.
He wasn’t the best of dads. Not the worst either. He tried to be there for them. Then he left.
At first the boy felt angry at him. Hurt that he would leave.
After some time, however, the boy began to realize something. His mother certainly wasn’t perfect either. The boy noticed that much of how she was now, she was like back then too.
She drove him out. She would deny it, but he left and went back home to Grenvarden to get away from her.
Begrudgingly, the boy couldn’t find it in himself anymore to blame him. He also wished he had a way out.
His thoughts fell away, and everything whirled around. There was no bedroom anymore as shimmering colors chased everything away.
Blurry images of people and places chased each other, one replaced the other as fast as thought. It was a kaleidoscope of memories. Barely remembered and nearly impossible to grasp. The torrent dispersed and a new place came into view.
The boy, a little older now, sat in an office. There was a desk in front of him with a man sitting behind it. His face was difficult to make out. There was another boy seated on another chair to the right. He was also difficult to discern.
The window to the left let in a pale light. Nothing outside could be seen. Everything, except for what was in this room, was washed out.
The boy held himself back from gingerly touching the bruise on his face. Instead, he kept his hands folded in his lap.
“I don’t know how many times I have to say this.” The man behind the desk said, sounding tired and grumpy. He ran a hand through his receding hairline. “This school does not condone fighting-”
The boy on the right tried to say something but the man cut him off.
“-no matter the reason!”
The other boy made a frustrated noise but didn’t say anything. The first boy didn’t bother to react. He just sat there and stared through the wall. There was no point in saying anything. He knew how this would go. It was always the same. The adults would never truly listen to what happened. They wouldn’t think about resolving any issues. They only cared about stomping down on the problem. Never mind that this fight wouldn’t have happened if the other boy didn’t antagonize him and get in his face when he didn’t react.
An adult would say, ‘Then go and tell a teacher.’ But they never did anything. It was always a tap on the wrist. A verbal warning. A threat to tell a parent. There was no conversation, no resolution, no compromise.
Their way only bred more anger and resentment.
“You clearly haven’t learned your lessons, so we’ll be calling your parents in-”
“Argh! But Mister-” The other boy tried to stall.
“Enough!” The headmaster shouted. “You clearly won’t listen to us. So, it's up to your parents to get through to you. We have exhausted all avenues.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Excuse me?” The headmasters head swiveled to him fast enough that there might have been some whiplash. “What did you say?”
“I said you haven’t exhausted every avenue.” The boy spoke calmly. He honestly didn’t know why he bothered to speak up. It wouldn’t go anywhere. “All you do is yell at us to stop. You never ask us why it happened or try to help us resolve our issues. You are too lazy or incompetent to actually get to the bottom of things. Probably both.”
He never looked away from the wall, so he likely never noticed the man or the other boy staring at him with outrage or shock. There was a short silence, to which the boy silently counted down in his head.
“That’s it.” The man said with finality as he reached for his phone. “Your mother can deal with your arrogance.”
Four seconds.
Four seconds to not even think about what he said, just to react in anger. Adults always told them to think before they leapt, and yet they did so much leaping without thinking for themselves.
“...yes, hello Miss Roydon. This is Hamish MacInnes, the Headmaster of Grenvarden secondary school. We’ve spoken before... yes... unfortunately. Will you be free to come in... Yes... that’s alright. Thank you... no, no... alright. See you then. Goodbye.”
The boy knew that the rest of the day was going to be a pain in the butt. Just as this clown of a headmaster couldn’t fathom the idea of asking questions, but instead condemn and condescend to him, so too would his mother ignore anything he had to say. So, he wouldn’t bother.
However, there was an odd feeling in him. There was something that caught his attention, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. It was just on the edge of his mind, elusive and fleeting.
Before he could think about it more the scene fell to pieces, and those pieces dissolved into grains of color. A current swept everything away and replaced them with a whirlwind of recollections. Places flashed by; a school playground, a park, some back streets, a train station. People appeared in these scenes; their identities escaped him, their faces familiar. The whirlwind folded in on itself and left behind a room.
The room had walls with odd looking panels. There were instruments placed throughout. Guitars, both acoustic and electric, a bass guitar, a couple keyboards against the wall, a few wind instruments and a set of drums.
A young man sat on a stool with a guitar and absentmindedly strummed the strings. He would tune them and play for a bit. The sound filled the room with aimless melodies.
“Something is on your mind.”
The young man looked up. His friend and tutor was setting up his own guitar. He held it by the neck close to the body and slung it into his lap. Then he turned a page on the stand in front of him.
It was after school, and they were using the music room. They were preparing for an end of year show, just before the winter holidays, and on any other day the young man would have lost himself in the lesson. Music felt like an escape from reality. He could relax and empty his mind when he played music.
But not today.
“I... got a message... from my dad.” He hesitated to say while plucking a string.
His friend looked up at him and waited a moment before asking, “Was it a good message?”
“He asked me how I was. How school was. That kind of thing.”
“That’s good, right?” His friend asked carefully.
“I guess...”
The friend watched the young man tune the guitar some more.
“How are you feeling about that?”
The young man shrugged and tapped on the wood of his guitar. He sighed before responding. “I... I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. It only happened this morning.”
His friend nodded in understanding.
There was a little more silence and the young man finally seemed to finish tuning and strummed the strings with finality. “It’s fine. Let’s just focus. I need to get this next part down.”
“Alright.” His tutor agreed but watched him for a moment longer before checking that they were at the right part of the song. “Time to finish Stairway to Grenvarden. After playing it so much, has it started to grate on your nerves yet?”
“Not quite there yet.” The young man responded with a smile, even though something about what was just said tickled his mind. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he couldn’t help but feel like something was wrong.
His train of thought derailed as the world shattered into glittering shards. Those shards eroded into sand, and that sand was swept away by a storm of reminiscence. Faces stared at him before dissolving into new ones, only to be replaced by others. His mother’s stressed face stared at him tiredly. His father looked at him with regret and a clenched jaw. Friends from school looked at him one by one. Others still, passed before his eyes. People he could barely remember but were immovable pieces of his past.
The familiar places that he walked; the streets close to home, the parks he visited, the halls of his school. They all fell away. The swell of memories abated and left the young man standing in a dark place. A void of unknowable depth. Faint light from stars shone from above, but their light could barely illuminate the hand in front of his face or the ground below.
From the darkness, a silhouette stood. A woman, shrouded just at the edge of the darkness. He couldn’t see her face and he didn’t know if she was even looking at him. He watched this woman and felt himself fading.