What We Do With It Ch. 01

Authors Note - This story is a result of my inner monolouge combined with a sleepless night, alot of coffee, and a wild imagination. It's also my first short story in years. Let me know what you think please!

Let me tell you a little something about regret. For I am it's scholar

I sit here on the edge of this man’s bed his head is lowered, one hand firmly resting on the bed side table beside him. My hand rests on his as I take his appearance in as I have done countless times before. The smell of him fills the air, and I memorize his eyes, and his lips, and his shoulders. My thumb gently brushes over his hand but he makes no motion to return this affection, my tears are falling down my increasingly cold cheeks and he makes no move to brush them away.

That dark skinned woman is standing over my shoulder now her hand is resting on one of my slumped shoulders, and she speaks. The man does not take notice to this stranger in his bedroom.

“It’s time now…”

I remove my hand from his and turn my head to look at her. Breathing in another breath, not out of need anymore but out of habit. I reply in a cracked voice.

“A few more minutes please?”

She doesn’t want to give it to me and for a moment her green eyes graze my face before she relents stepping back and I turn my attentions back to him, inching closer to his form, his head hanging, breathing deep. My eyes speak volumes of how very sorry I am, and yet I can’t phrase it right to say it out loud. Not that it would really matter at this point. So I sit watching him just be there his music filling the room, every now and then his lips mouth the words to the current song. I remember those lips, I feel the other woman’s presence and rise. The mattress doesn’t move, it betrays nothing about my presence in this bedroom.

As it always has my soul aches because I’m going away from him again , I turn away anyway and looked up at the woman.

Without her telling me I know she’s my guide, when she’d came for me earlier she’d called herself Jada and I followed her trustingly. As am I doing now

“I’m ready now, we can leave.”

Without looking back at him she lets me walk beside her through his wall and back into the endless labyrinth of blue light, not over bearing, and most defiantly not underwhelming either.

“You’ll be able to go back to anywhere you wish soon little one,” she has a soft Creole accent that I immediately loved, even during this extremely strange voyage. “ but first you must be shown the ropes. And you need an explanation” I nod passively and glance around as we walk. The structure of this maze amazes me as I watch the paths change and the glow it’s made of swirl and twist under our feet.

And then just like that we’re back in New York, in a place I had not requested to go. The familiar swings and the jungle gym, and the asphalt under my spectral feet. Furrowing my eyebrows I look to my guide questioningly

“It’s time to learn now, I chose here because this was a place of your happy times. Uninhabited and…I think I like it as well.” I can’t help but smirk at her, I liked this park too after all it’d been my haunt for most of my child hood (pardon the pun), however not many people can appreciate the subtle beauty of a New York City playground. Sitting on a bench I crossed my ankles and patted my pockets for my pack of trust cigarettes logically finding none. Jada stood before me and smiled almost tenderly watching me practice those life-long habits that, unlike me just wouldn’t die.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully clearing her throat so I raise my eyes to her figure in front of me, “You are gone, as you have been for the last twelve hours and fourteen minutes. Do you remember anything of how you died Glory?”

I blink and nod very slowly as my last living memory is rehashed in my mind. “My friends car, it slid off the road. It was foggy and raining. Off an -” I paused squinting my eyes trying to recapture exactly what I’d last recalled seeing. “off an over pass. I remember the ground, then standing on the side of the road, with you.” I look up at Jada and blink with wide eyes. “Did…did Emma make it out?” My guide nods quietly, “She’s in the hospital, intensive care. Your friend is quite a fighter. You were lost on impact.”

The finality of death is finally sinking in now and tears again roll down my cheeks. I rasp another breath as the last 20 years highlights play in a loop inside my head, if my guide is speaking I can’t hear her right now, because I’m fifteen years in the past, right over there on that swing set playing with the other little girls.

And then I’m somewhere else, fifth grade inside a classroom up at a board writing out a math equation and the memory of my intense satisfaction surges through my heart as my teach affectionately pats her mathematically inept student on the back.

Same year, a few months forward and the little me is walking through the Nile temple they had at some museum. The traces left of the longing I’d felt as I reached out to touch its sand colored walls are all relived in this moment. I remember the security guard clearing his throat harshly and my little arm dropping to my side immediately.

Jada is merely standing there another look of tenderness on her motherly face. I pay no mind to her right now lost in my own silent revelry, she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

Thirteen years old in the sunlit woods, the red headed older boy helps me over a rocky unsettled patch of earth. Almost effortlessly I’m in his arms and he’s kissing me, my real kiss and I smirk slightly in spite of my self and my distressing non corporeal state.

But nothing is dragging me away from this rehashing of what made life so very beautiful.

It’s my birthday and I’m eighteen getting my first tattoo while my best friend looks on, my heart fluttering as the exhilaration and the utter independence I’d felt that day is relived for a heartbreaking second before I’m someplace else.

Only a few months ago, the man I’d left a few minutes ago in his bedroom, a porch, in wintertime. So many emotions hit me then that I hold my chest and shudder for a good minute or so until it passes enough for me to look back up at Jada.

“Am I going to my funeral?” I’m shaking like a reed as I watch her face very closely in the slowly dawning light.

“You may, and then again you may not get a chance to,” Slowly as if collecting herself as well she comes and sits beside me wiping the still falling tears from my cheeks. “Your body is alive Glory, and you are in a coma .We pulled you out early, its all fairly open ended at this moment in time my dear, and it’s all up to you really.”

I swear to you. If she wasn’t already dead. I’d strangle her.