Ideas for stories

If I think back, (you’d tell me hindsight is 20/20 and I’d roll my eyes) I could recall a few times that I’d step in front of an automatic door and it wouldn’t open (I’d say to you that it was because I had no soul, you’d smirk), I’d hold my hand under an automatic faucet or wave it around a few times and no water would come out, no soap from the dispenser, no paper towel (I would’ve made the same soul joke but you were in the other bathroom). There were a few times we’d sit at a restaurant for a while in a booth, waiting for an acknowledgement that wouldn’t come before we’d leave hungry and slightly inconvenienced.

We would turn on every single loud and repetitive toy in the department store toy aisle and smile our toothiest grins at each other (we’d laugh) somebody from another aisle would sigh in a loud annoyance, glaring at us as they walked past the aisle but they’d never look at us directly, never tell us to grow up, never tell us to stop acting immature (we never would).

I remember the day I told you to go away though not what day it was. I remember your long sleeved black shirt, your black pants and boots. Your black hair, your painted nails, nobody else dressed the way you did. I remember the lights flickering on and off, doors slamming, an argument with –let’s call her Tornado leading me to scream at you and curse you away. I remember how many people told me that I didn’t see you and the day I finally stopped believing. I know you had to go away because being normal involved not seeing you, not talking to you. I stopped finding money on the ground, rings and necklaces, trinkets. The world lost its magic. Everything went to hell.

I awoke last night from a dream, confused. The final guitar riff in a fairly new song was screaming at me when you shoved me playfully and my eyes opened. With the elated post laughter hangover feeling I looked over at the pillow next to me, to see if you were still laughing. But my room came into focus and it was me, here, without you as I have been for most of my life. The confusion came as I stood in the hallway a moment later and thought to myself, wait a minute why did I think you were there and what had I been dreaming about?

Somebody said to me recently, something to the effect of creating a safe space through writing. And I said that’s bullshit, this is all bullshit, that’s not world we live in.

But it stuck with me, why wasn’t it okay to rewrite my past or write a new future?

Then I wrote this and answered my own question.

But what if the tables were turned the day you went away? What if Tornado was yelling at you and telling you that seeing me wasn’t normal? What if the faucets, automatic doors and people that don’t see me are right? What if I left you instead, because I was never really there to begin with?

Notes

Chapter title is from Slept So Long by Jay Gordon