I Remember {MJ FANFICTION}

Chapter 1

I had counted three sunrises since my arrival.

By now I'd cried all the tears that I could cry and found a location to hide out in under a grey bench-like slab inside of an abandoned half crumbled building a small way away from the city.

For days, I'd wished and willed for myself to return home. I'd tried to fall asleep but every time I woke up my cheeks were still stained with tears and I was still in Egypt.

I spent the daytime slowly cooking beneath the slab in the brutal heat. There was no way I could hope to withstand it for very long with my delicate skin. I'd avoided every passing stray cat, flinched at every barking dog and slipped into complete obscurity, hiding away from pretty much every other human being that passed me by, and there had been a few.

I guess you could say that in a way I'd forgotten how to live. There was no waking up in the morning in a bed and taking a shower, no hot water, no tour...no nothing! Nothing but sand and a vicious sun baring down on me from dawn until dusk. I spent all day and night hiding and wishing and crying, I felt pathetic. I tried desperately to remember the old tea lady's words and racked my brain all day trying to piece her, what I now perceived to be passive aggressive, riddle together again.

She had definitely said something about not changing the past and honestly the only other thing that I could recall from my memory was that she had promised me that I would be getting what I desired.

I was angry. This was not even close to any kind of desire of mine! This was evil, she'd done some bad juju to land me here and it seemed even prayer to the man upstairs couldn't even get me out of this.

But my doom was not to be short lived like I had hoped, and as a result of my mental resistance of this new reality, my body was beginning to suffer greatly from starvation. I had nothing, no food or water.

The last thing I'd consumed was the beer from the accommodating lady I had met when I wound up here and I felt like I was going to come to a very bad end if I didn't find some way to nourish myself soon.

During the past few days, I'd spent the nights wandering my surroundings when nobody was out and it seemed most of this large village was sleeping. I'd retraced my steps a few times in search of a portal that would take me back home and looked for it under the same sands that I'd been unearthed in. I'd lay down in the same spot on the ground but nothing had happened.

In my secret trips back and forth I came to know of a still pool of water trailing into the city, no doubt as a close-by source for the people not too far from where I was located. The people often left behind a bucket beside it until morning when they would use it again to fetch water. I hadn't been brave enough to go near the thing before when I thought this was all made up and I'd wake up out of my sleep at any second but it seemed now that I had to take what ever means of survival I could get my hands on.

Once the sun had done me a graceful favour and retreated in place of the moon, I finally crawled out of my tiny slot beneath the slab and peered around.

Nobody was out.

I walked warily along the same trail that was becoming very familiar to me and knelt down, placing both hands down at the edge of the water, and stared into the black mass. My fantasy of cupping the water and drinking it was purely due to wishful thinking more than anything else. I knew that none of this was like the modern day. I could not expect to just drink out of a still body of water and hope to keep my health. Parasites and bacteria were a very real danger floating beyond the naked eye. But if I knew anything about organic refreshment, it was that as long as I boiled the water I could purify it and hope to drink without as much risk. Getting a fire lit was a whole other issue but I'd cross that hurdle when I came to it, for right now I had to do something, anything. I glanced up at my makeshift shack. Still, nobody was around.