Lost and Found

The smell of earth filled my nostrils and I had an unpleasant pounding in my head.  I sat up.  A few realizations entered my consciousness, but they were dulled by the pounding.  I was outside, and the stars were hurting my eyes.  I was also holding a leather notebook;  it was brown, and had a metal clasp on the cover. Smooth to the touch, it distracted me for a moment.   I stood up to try and walk towards a wooden  bench that was on my right, but I quickly fell down again. I wondered if this happened often, but it slowly dawned on me that I remembered nothing. Panic and the pounding were threatening to overwhelm me, and their intensities were both rising.  I felt a tug on my hair and realized that it was caused by my own hands.  A blaring noise attacked my ears.  I pulled a phone from my the pocket of my dirt-streaked blue jeans.   Flipping it open, I was informed by a too-bright screen that I had a text from an unknown number.  The text said, “Read the journal”.  

    The journal!  It lay on the ground next to me.  But wait--the phone.  I hastily flipped through its contents, looking for some sort of clue to my identity.  I found none.  No contacts, no pictures, no other messages.    I reached for the journal and carefully opened its metal clasp, cool under my fingers.  The first page was blank, and the second contained only two and a half lines.  “This book will be your roadmap through the tangled and twisted streets that are the broken pieces of your past. It is up to you if you want to put the puzzle back together or start on a new work of art.”  

    Curiosity gripped me, and I could not resist turning the page.  

January1, 2012

I have decided to keep a journal this year.  Maybe it will help me make sense of things.  So… hi.  I’m George.  My birthday is March 2, 1998.   I live with my dad.  He has…. interesting ideas on how to treat people.  He is preparing me for something, something that is supposed to be “worth it” and “rewarding”.  I am having a hard time understanding how the “right thing”  could be so cruel.  I guess it’s okay, though.  Because I don’t have to understand.  I just have to do.  It’s not like I have much of a choice.

Who was George?  And why do I have his journal?  I didn’t know what else to do but to keep reading.

January 9, 2012

Well, there goes writing every day.  I haven’t had much to say, anyway.  There is an overpowering dullness that intoxicates my life.  Same routine, every day, same poisonous beliefs whispered into my ear every day, by the same hungry mouth.  The days are counting down, though, until I am forced to do it.  Forced to kill myself, and everyone else on the flight.  The thing is that I am terrified because I really have no idea how to stop it.  I’m scared of what happens next, because I don’t know if what Dad said was true. Will I really be rewarded for this? It feels wrong.  And there are going to be kids on that plane with me?  There are going to be moms and dads and sisters and brothers and friends.  How can I take those people from the lives they are touching?  The lives that are going on, completely independently from my own?  How could I not, though?  How could I defy my father?   

    Oh my god.  This is crazy.  How is this someone’s life?  How is it sitting in my lap right now?  A shiver ran down my spine, but it wasn’t from the cold.  I noticed that I was anxiously playing with dog tags that hung from my neck.  I looked down at them.  The silver metal shone in the moonlight, but I couldn’t read the inscription.  I pulled out the-my?- phone and used its light to read.

    “George, may the road rise to greet you. Love, Melody.”

    No. No. Does that make me George?  Does that mean that I’m going to kill people - even worse, have I? What was going on?  Why couldn’t I remember?  Only one way to find out.