7: Names

My eyes hovered over the call button and my finger lingered and twitched over it, threatening to call Kind’s girlfriend to destroy her beautiful life. Not only would I have to tell her that he was dead, but I would also have to destroy her conception of love by telling her he cheated on her on the last day he was alive, and that he cheated on her with me. It felt like a missile crisis, and I was about to launch an atomic bomb that would start a war nobody needed.

I thought about sealing this war inside of me, but my body was shaking so hard that I feared the shame would escape through my eyeholes. Mortified, I looked at her photo above the call button; she looked so pretty and so innocent. I could see the peace in her eyes, a peace I no longer had, and that broke me.

Just as the first tears began rolling down my eyes, the door of the apartment was slammed open. I screamed and fell to the ground.

It was Memory.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, startled and somehow scared.

My stomach dropped all the way to the soles of my feet. My mind went blank. It felt as if every emotion possible flooded my head with all the force my brain could muster. I stood up, pushed him aside, and ran out of the apartment, feeling as though I was stepping on my stomach, still heavy in my feet, until I reached Archie’s room.

I banged and knocked on the door, screaming, until he finally opened it. I threw myself into his arms and cried so hard that I fainted after blabbing irrationally about Kind’s infidelity and how much I missed him.

“He misses you too,” he said sadly.

After, he sat me down and gave me a cup of tea. He turned on the TV and a broadcast showing strange lights in the sky came up. The lights were all of all colors, and they covered the skies above the clouds. Beams of neon hues of green and purple escaped through the cracks of the clouds into the forests and cities around the world. The reporters were explaining that they came from deep into outer space, so far away that our telescopes and computers couldn’t even see them. Nobody knew what they were, but they were not a natural occurrence.

“Can’t we just have a normal graduation?!” Archie exclaimed, angry. ” It’s hard as it is! Now I have to deal with aliens too?!”

I stood up and opened the window. There were no neon lights or aliens in the skies, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t know too much about the world, I hadn’t traveled much or at all, but I knew that the skies in Austria and Germany were the most beautiful sights on the planet, and that night was no exception.

“Why did you say Kind misses me too?” I asked Archie. “How do you know?”

“Oh, because I talked to him this morning.”

“What?!”

“I saw him in my dreams when I did Astral Projection today. And you can talk to him too.”