Beyond the Galaxy

Chapter 11 - The Final Breath of Moonlight [END OF PART ONE]

Lottie's Point of View

The morning of my departure, I dreamed of exactly what I was leaving for. Well, it started as just a normal dream, anyway. It only soured into a nightmare once I found the truth I had unknowingly been struggling to face in consciousness.

It was a beautiful day in the dream. A gorgeous day, in fact. The sky was like a painting, a perfect shade of blue with the occasional wisp of white cloud. The air was warm like a subtle breath of spring and sent a breeze fluttering across endless grass. My office looked identical to the office that I had once held in the HHDA while Niko and Wardell worked together in a shared office upstairs. It was the image of a perfect morning—The slowness of the day creeping further and further with the lack of responsibility sinking onto my shoulders, a productive session of composing an essay-type document with words that had since vanished from memory upon waking, and the drawling of soft classical music in the background of my work. At some point, I had thought to myself that with the joy I found there, I never wanted to go back home again.

Later on, Wardell had brought me a few envelopes from the mail in his usual few-word demeanor. Two of the three envelopes had also promptly slipped from memory, though one stood out to me. At the time, it wasn't anything more than an element of the unusual dream logic, but I realized the truth once my eyes flung open once again. It was a black-rimmed envelope in dark text, addressed to me from what must have symbolized my own home address. This was, if only in the dream, a notion of a terrible occurrence from home. A frightening accident, a sudden dilemma, a dire emergency, or even loss.

My eyes fluttered open with Uncle Lyle locked into my mind. If I left him alone today, there was no telling what would have happened. He hadn't spent his life alone in over twenty years. Both of his daughters moved out at different times in the nineties, someone else he had once cared deeply about disappeared on him in the middle of the night in the early two-thousands, but then I had taken their places when I was seven. Not only that, but this time he didn't even have his work to distract himself. He was going to be alone at home day after day. Once I was gone, what was going to become of him?

With rotating thoughts of abandoning someone I had spent almost my entire life with as well as the envelope that burned into my memory from the dream screaming out into my subconscious, I soon found myself gripping my pillow close to my chest and shuddering with silent sobs that squeezed from my eyes and dripped down onto the fabric of the pillowcase. Once the first tears had snuck down my face, it was as though I had opened up a dam and every ounce of the emotion pressing down onto me was being unleashed through monstrous waterworks. The darkness that enclosed me set its prying eyes on me as I cried, clinging to my pillow as if it were everything I dreaded to let go from my life here and spilled out my soul with springing tears that wouldn't stop.

I blinked and everything was still again. The darkness was still. The air was still. My breath was still. The dampness still streaked across my cheeks and my arms still clenched my pillow, but the tears had vanished and an empty sense of uncoiling desolation in the depths of my chest replaced them. The moment was still, just as suddenly as it had wreaked havoc just minutes ago, but my mind raced with thoughts.

Maybe I could have canceled it. Maybe I could have canceled everything. Forfeited my plane ticket, ordered my belongings back, and fired Niko and Wardell just to spend more time with the animal that raised me. It was a compelling argument to slip out the easy way, but I had spent half a year preparing for this already. I had given work and purpose to those who had been struggling. There was no way out of it. Somehow, I had to move on. But the problem was that I wasn't quite so sure if I could have managed it.