Hold onto Hope

I was fifteen when it first happened. I had been curled in a ball in the corner of my room, blasting music in my headphones to try and block out my mom’s screams, when silence fell heavy around me. The sounds of waves soon replaced the quiet. Then came the feeling of coarse sand squeezing between my bare toes.

I was at the beach, or more specifically the small secluded beach that had been minutes away from my old house in California, a place that had become my solace from the ages of ten to thirteen. I had some of the best moments in my life on that beach. Before my mom remarried and moved us two states away. Away from the beach and towards a life of living in crappy trailer parks and an endless stream of drugs and learning how to cover up bruises.

I had not smelled the comforting saltiness of the ocean or felt the warmth of the sand beneath me since. Not until that moment. 

At first I thought I was dreaming. I often had vivid dreams on the nights when I actually was able to sleep. This time was different though. The taste of the night-air and the sound of the palm trees rustling was incredibly real. Far too real to just be a dream. Then as fast as I had appeared on that beach, I was back in my tiny room, letting the deafening music and faint yells drag me to sleep. 

When I woke up the next morning, I chalked up the previous night’s experience as a sleep-deprived hallucination. 

***

It started to happen more frequently after that night and I finally had to admit to myself that nothing about these ‘incidents’ were a figment of my imagination. They were as real as the heartbeat in my chest. 

In the following years that came after that first time, I learned how to ‘travel’ at will.  I found that I could travel to any memory that I wanted, but only for five minutes at a time. Never more than five minutes, no matter how hard I tried to grasp on to those lingering memories. 

As time continued to pass by and things around me changed, the only constant was my memories. Even when my mother died and I ran away from the abuse that I had been enduring for far too long. 

I didn’t have anyone around me since my mother passed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Life was bleak and disappointing and I didn’t try to change it. I had accepted my life as a failure already; I felt like I was cursed to an unforgiving life, a cruel existence in which no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to meet anyone’s expectations, including my own.

So I learned to live life in the short span of all of the good ‘trips’ that I had, even though there weren’t many good memories to go back to. 

I still don’t know how I did it, but I never tried to find out. I had a thought that if I shined a light on these ‘abilities’, they would somehow disappear, like every good thing in my life. So I forced myself not to be curious and I spent my days living out the best moments that my life had to offer so far: loud bus rides to zoos, singing stupid children’s songs at the top of my lungs; playing in the mud with other neighborhood kids and running home to take a warm bath after; sloppy kisses in cars, high off weed and the feeling of being young. All of the times when I didn’t have a single care in the world. Before I was forced to grow up at the hands of broken beer bottles and yelled curses that cut like knives. 

It came to be like a drug, these ‘trips’. Every minute that I wasn’t able to travel back, I ached for it. While I was at work at the shitty convenience store that I had been working at since I dropped out of high school. While I was having meaningless sex to try and drive away the loneliness. While I was out alone getting drunk out of my mind and stumbling to my apartment at 3AM.

It was completely consuming; that promise of being able to leave, even if it was for only a short amount of time. 

Then one day it stopped.

Nothing particularly interesting had happened that day. It was a day like any other: me waking up hungover, running into work late with apologies falling from my lips, sitting behind the cash register with bleary eyes, taking small lunch breaks throughout the day to travel back to my memories, walking to the bar next to my apartment where I stayed until the moon bathed the sticky floor with white-light.

 It was when I made my way to the dirty back alley behind the bar and sat down on the alcohol-soaked asphalt where I braced myself for the feeling of the disgusting slosh of alcohol to disappear. For the feeling of complete calm that always accompanied my ‘trips’. But it never came. An hour passed. Still nothing. So I waited another hour and another, panic slowly building up in my gut with every minute that passed by.  

It was the most agonizing night that I had ever lived through in my entire twenty-three years. It felt like God was playing some sort of disgusting joke on me, deciding that taking my mother wasn’t enough, he had to come back and take the only good thing I had left. 

I had never understood what people meant when they talked about heartbreak, but at that moment I knew. 

Consumed with warring feelings of sadness, anger, and hollowness, I came to the thought that there was no part of me that would be able to survive if I couldn’t ‘travel’. It had become an inextricably linked part of my being, and maybe it had become my crutch, but I wasn’t brave enough to believe that I was strong enough to go on living without it. 

So I decided at that moment. I would not, I could not, live, because my life was nothing without my memories. My ‘trips’. They were the only place where I wasn’t alone. The only place where I felt happiness. The only place where I could see my mom, the way she used to be before the alcohol and drugs. 

So with an energy I hadn’t felt in years, I ran to my apartment and grabbed the gun from my safe.

The thought of death had stopped scaring me a long time ago, so I had no hesitation as I moved to my bathroom and sat in the little porcelain bathtub, clicking off the safety. 

I found it in myself to try one last-ditch effort to transport to the lovely beach from my memory, but it was to no avail. The failed attempt just left me with tears in my eyes and a renewed burst of anger.

 I pulled the trigger.

***

I pulled the trigger and nothing happened. 

Nothing.

No pain,no loss of consciousness, no fading to darkness.

I slowly opened my eyes. The bright light that greeted me made me jump up. 

Was I dead?

That thought stopped dead in its tracks as my eyes adjusted and I saw that I was still in the bathtub. But this time it wasn’t my small, rusty one that was in my apartment. This one was at least twice the size and filled with hot water… and rose petals? 

The water caressing my naked body was as real as anything I had ever experienced, but it couldn’t be a memory. There was nothing about this situation that I recognized. 

Right then the bathroom door swung open and a warm voice called out, “Honey! I got the wine!”, followed by a beautiful woman wearing a white robe walking in and closing the door behind her. 

“H-honey?”

The woman seemed to think this was funny as she dropped the robe and stepped into the tub with me. 

I startled and splashed backwards, which just made the woman laugh harder. 

“You are really something,” she sighed and leaned back, “I finally got the kids to sleep so don’t make too much noise.”

I blinked a few times. Kids? 

“What year is it?” I asked seriously, leaning forward.

This made the woman roll her eyes, but she was smiling as she said,  “Come on.”

I cleared my throat, “Humor me.”

She suddenly sat up with a look of excitement, “Oooh, is this some sort of roleplay? Okay,” she coughed and dramatically sat up, “It is the year 2027. I am your wife, Hope. You've suffered a traumatic injury and you have severe amnesia, but don’t worry, I can make it better.”

2027. 2027. 202720272027. Seven years in the future.

I was pulled out of my thoughts as lips pressed against mine. 

And as quickly as her lips touched mine, they were gone and I was back in my dingy bathroom, gun pressed against my forehead. 

I jumped up, snapping the safety back on and throwing the gun across the room.

What the hell was that?

I barely made it to the toilet before I retched up all of the cheap whiskey that had been sitting in my stomach. 

***

The following week was surreal. I traveled a few more times, but it was never constant and it was completely out of my control.

I had taken to wandering the streets at night, completely sober and trying to make sense of these new ‘trips’. 

All of them had been good. Traveling to sit in front of two laughing children who looked an awful lot like me; waking up in a bed next to the mysterious women who apparently was my wife, Hope, looking at me with more adoration than I had ever seen directed my way; walking two unusually large dogs through a beautiful park, the ground littered with orange and yellow leaves.

If all of that was my destiny, then maybe life was worth living. 

I held onto that thought as I walked up the stairs to my apartment and turned the corner- right into a woman carrying a huge moving box. The slam of the box hitting the ground made me flinch and turn my head away. The soft hand on my shoulder and a concerned, “Ah, I am so sorry. Are you okay?”, made me look up. 

My eyes met an all-too familiar face.

The woman continued, “It looks like I’m your new neighbor. Again, I am so sorry, I should have been more careful,” she removed the hand that was on my shoulder and held it in front of me to shake, “the name’s Hope. Nice to meet you.”