Past Life Karma

"Past Life Karma" 

A Short Story by Shannon Munnik 

PART ONE 

“Farrah, 

I’ve grown tired of this life, and I’ve realized I’m not living it for me. I need to take responsibility for my own happiness, because I’m sick of pretending to be satisfied. I’m leaving to find it. If I don’t succeed, at least the change of scenery will be nice. 

Best, 

Crystal” 

          I left her two years ago. My mind became so cluttered with tasks I had to keep up with for a life I didn’t want. I left in a blind haze, convinced that whatever I found or wherever I found myself would be better. I tried everything to make my life lose its mundanity, each attempt bringing me closer to the reality that I was distracting myself from a dead-end life. Farrah did everything she could for me. She constantly told me to be present, which is the best advice I’ve ever received. I’ve never been a gracious person; I wasn’t grateful for her like I should’ve been. That’s beside the point, I left my life to wander. I pulled my savings together, drove to different cities, and spent two years amongst strangers. At first, I was never bored. I fell in love with having nobody to save me; it made me feel real. I spent nights in my car and sometimes with people I made fast friends with. I hardly spent any of those two years sober, which made me feel hyperreal. The money ran out, the drugs ran out, the thrill ran out, and within the last month, it became a never-ending struggle. The fuzzy memory of Farrah came to haunt me. I was desperately escaping my guilt, knowing that I made an ugly dent in her life. I couldn’t survive myself anymore. 

PART TWO 

          Just as I impulsively left my life with her, I left my life as an aimless soul. After two years, I moved in with friends in our hometown and became an intern at a local newspaper. I was desperate for purpose, for answers. Ultimately, I didn’t trust myself. It felt futile trying to gain a sense of normalcy when it drove me to lunacy. I couldn’t predict if I was going to turn my life into a tennis match between recklessness and capitalist routine. The worst part was, I didn’t learn anything from those two years. It was a grandeur distraction. I had grown tired of pretending I was transforming. My only purpose had become to fight for Farrah in my life again. I loved her more than anything, and it killed me that she wasn’t enough to distract me from my detestation of the world anymore. The older we got, the more we grew into what the world expected of us. Instead of resenting that, I should’ve changed it, and I needed to tell her that.  

       “It’s Crystal. I need to tell you my conclusions. Meet me at the hotel bar at 8.” 

          Blood rushed through my body but stopped at my face, nose deep in the text I felt foolish for sending. I half expected her to send a crew to ambush me, and I would’ve understood. I was prepared. I had planned to tell her I shut her out when I needed her the most. That I thought I was unfixable, that the world was unfixable. Those feelings were still there, but I would have rather been unfixable, with her making me strive to fix myself. I had no expectations. My ideal scenario was for her to see right through me, as she usually did, and see I made a manic mistake, and that I was genuinely trying. I didn’t receive a text back. I was slightly crushed. Maybe I did have expectations. It dawned on me she had the power to change my perception of existence without a word, but I swallowed that reality like an oversized pill. Suffering with an ache in my chest. I went to the hotel anyway, expectations in hand. 

PART THREE 

          Halfway through a glass of whiskey, doubts pervaded me. I wondered if this was my last grasp at something tangible, just to feel in control of myself. The concept of this event negatively impacting Farrah didn’t occur to me until I was drowning in my loneliness at a hotel bar, shooing away amorous old men trying to engage with me. Ten minutes past the hour, I draped my black leather trench coat across my lap to cover my right leg shaking profusely. I pretended to be attentive to social media, though nothing distracted me in the slightest from what seemed like my impending doom. Thirty minutes past the hour, and a full glass of whiskey deep, I acknowledged my pathetic attempt at full restoration of mine and Farrah’s relationship. I was caught up in the fantasy of being given full mercy for a mistake that permanently altered, if not damaged, someone’s life. Forty minutes, and I raised my white flag. Consequential thoughts of self-loathing surged me. I ordered a last glass of whiskey to compliment my sorrow before I left the bar. I felt a sharp draft from the door violate my neck and back. I made a hopeless glance to discover her cold gaze, and my eyes frozen open. Her ankle height heeled boots made echoes in the cacophonous room as they strutted towards me. Her face remained unchanged, not giving me a morsel of her mind. Seeing her unleashed beautiful memories, it wasn’t the first time she was the only person I saw in a crowded room. I couldn’t shake the worry off my face while her eyes didn’t buckle off mine. She slowed her walking pace to a crawl as she became inches away from me, giving me no room to stand up from my stool. Her eyes were killing me. The soft hazel hue that once gave me security had turned violent. I felt like Alice looking into the rabbit hole before she fell into it for miles and miles. I couldn’t speak. With her numbing stare, I expected her to say something, or rather, I was longing to listen. She seated herself on the stool next to me without a word, but her eyes still analyzing me. Our eyes were locked for a perpetual breath. I wondered if she was, in fact, seeing right through me. I began to feel assured. I let out a closed mouth smile and softened my eyes, ready to unveil and justify my devotion. In the same second I revealed my beaming face, she stood from her stool to tower over me. She leered at my suddenly timid face and switched her gaze to the door as she strode out of the hotel, and out of my life.

PART FOUR 

I knew she was a narcissist before she left, but she solidified it when I woke up to her note on the kitchen counter. She only wrote that note so that people wouldn’t search for her, she wasn’t doing it to spare my feelings. I was the last thing on her mind when she wrote that goddamn note. When I read it, I could only focus on how she made it about her. It sounded as if she wanted me to be happy for her newfound purpose in life. Which was bullshit too, she was just running. Crystal would run until her legs ground to dust before she faced any conflict head-on. She ran from her family before she met me, and no amount of telling her she’s creating larger problems for herself could coax her into talking things through. She could’ve talked things through with me. I spent those two years questioning my worth. Knowing that I wasn’t enough to keep her “satisfied”, made me unsure if I could satisfy anybody. I got lost in my work, barely spent any time out of the office because our apartment made me sick, and surrounded myself in friends that felt bad for me. I reached the epiphany that I wasn’t responsible for Crystal’s satisfaction or unhappiness. Everything she had been running from had just finally caught up with her, and she ran again. I understood her disdain for normalcy, I hated it too. What separated us was my willingness to put my last breath into our relationship, for both our sakes. For times when the world lost all its color, she and I could’ve ignored it all and been in full bloom. The worst part is, I would’ve left our life with her.