This is another one of those narrative prose style stories I keep meaning to write. I sit here, late in the evening on a Friday, laptop in front of me and I wonder....
On the first morning I was awoken from this terrible nightmare of a dream. Nothing in the world seemed close to me. Nothing seemed to matter.
Have I really wasted all of these years? Filling my life with needless wants, needless desires and fake people who care for nothing but themselves? Have I really turned into one of those people? Can I really be sure I am who I say I am?
What if the person I think I should be is just a dream, a dream I had when I was ten years old? How can you be sure that you exist when nothing you touch seems real? Everything that should have texture feels hollow on the inside.
Looking up at the sky, through the glass ceiling in the place I called "home", I begin to imagine if those red clouds really are supposed to be red. Can the world be different than how I'm seeing it now?
My eyes begin to dart around the room, trying to find something I can focus on, something that I can count on the be 'real'. Anything? Does anything seem to exist?
I begin to panic. A sudden realization has come over me, can it really be true? How could I have been living a lie all of these years?
Looking for something to grab onto, something to gain some balance in my life. Running through the hallways, peering into empty room after empty room.
A bead of sweat begins to roll down my forehead, my arms are too heavy to wipe it away. After a minute it begins to follow the contour of my eyebrow and makes contact with my eye.
Instinctively, I try to blink the salt away.
The world seemingly ceased to exist around me, everyone had chosen to move on.
Left alone and standing in the middle of a giant room. The echos of footsteps from a million years ago resound around me.
The walls start to cave in around me, pictures are falling off the wall. LIghts begin to smash on the hard concrete floor in front of my shoeless feet.
The red painted ceiling begins to crack at the edges, sunlight begins to fill the room.
Holding my hand up in front of my face to shield myself. I begin to feel a faint breeze move across the back of my hand.
My eyes begin to adjust to the new world around me, I begin to see shapes and colours I had not seen before. Was the grass always this green? Did the fish really swim in the water?
Directly before me is a road that goes in two directions.
To the left the road is no longer paved, it is twisted and bumpy. But the sun shines off in the distance.
To the right the road is perfectly paved and straight as a pin. Off in the distance a dark cloud hangs over head threating to impede my progress.
Which direction is the one to choose? The easy one on the right? Or the difficult one on the left? Where will my happiness finally take me?
Looking down each road I begin to get confused, which one will lead me to a better life? Which one will make sure that my children will be safe and provided for?
Spinning in a small circle, I begin to run.
Somewhere on the road ahead, a faint bump appears before me. As the days went ahead, the bump never did seem to get closer, the more I ran towards what I thought was my salvation, the further it seemed to move away from me.
That small, insignificant speck in the distance to which I had been running towards all of these years.
The very one that I had almost given up all hope in reaching and turning back to a life of despair.
That bump... that bump was you.
I have this habit of starting a story with the clear intention of making it about something, in this case a life of ruin and desperation. Somewhere along the way the story just grows and evolves, gathers a life of its own and runs away from me. This story is as factual as you'd like to take it, its also been embellish and expanded for the sake of the story. I will not disclose what is true and what isn't, that is for your assumptions.
