Peyton Norelle has closed herself off from the world.
Ever since her sister's death two years ago, she has wrapped her heart with chains, protecting and guarding it, ensuring that nobody ever got past her walls. She's just been floating, after havin...
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S E V E N
M E M O R Y L A N E
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melancholy & haunting moments
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OUR MINDS ARE SUCH strange things.
They remember the weirdest of things, like what colour the cotton candy that you ate at a carnival was when you were six, or exactly what your teacher had been wearing on a certain day of middle school.
You know what I'm talking about—those extremely specific, extremely detailed memories that always seem to be trivial, but yet, you can remember them to exact precision.
The same went for tunes. Whether it be that one toothpaste jingle that you always heard in between your cartoons, or the cheery song that the ice-cream truck always plays to let everyone know that it was around.
Yeah, those.
As annoying as they may be, for some reason, they seem to stay etched in your memory for the longest time, and when you think about them, they can play in your head almost as fast as 'Shape of You'.
And that's probably because you heard it close to every single day. In the middle of Spongebob, or after you had finished watching reruns of old Disney shows, and all you wanted was a nice, delicious cone of cookies-and-cream to refresh you from the July summer sun beating down your back.
You heard it so often that it didn't actually register to you how much you heard it, and how your brain had already processed it as one of your
Most significant memories.
Oddly enough, mine was not the advertisement jingles, nor any of those badly composed children's shows' theme songs, or even a pop song, though I had heard my fair share of each of those. In fact, the most familiar tune to me probably never played on the radio, or on TV, or anywhere, really. It would be a miracle if you could find it in any other form besides vinyl.
You might be wondering: how did such an ancient song ever become the song that I could hum anytime I wanted, even when a completely different song of a completely different vibe was playing in the background? How was it so much more familiar to me than everything else in my childhood?
Well, the reasoning behind it is that I heard it on repeat at the only other place you spend more time at than in school.
In my very own home.
I still remember so clearly how my mother would only put the record on at exactly 2.02pm in the afternoon, when Harper and I had just returned from school. The beginning notes would ring out around us scratchily, with that unique quality that only record players could ever produce. Four beats before the first line of the first verse began, she would take Harper's hands in hers and wait, before whisking her into a dance.
And this would be a routine, every single day after school, never a minute later, never a minute earlier. Always on time; for basically my entire life.
I hadn't heard it ever since I left. I made myself promise I wouldn't. It was another part of myself that I had vowed that I would leave behind. It wasn't that hard to avoid. It was such an old song that it barely appeared anywhere. So you would think that it would be easy to forget. But old habits die hard.
Which was how I realised that every day after I had left, I found myself stopping everything I was doing the moment the clock displayed 2.02. If I was in class, I would stop writing for just a second. Just a short second. Why, I wasn't sure. But all I knew was that it happened. Wherever I was, at exactly 2.02pm, everything going on in my head, in front of me, everywhere, would just stop.
And so as I was walking down the hallway, clutching my books to my chest, thinking about afternoons spent in a deserted house, right smack in the middle of a field, watching my mother and sister dance around me—afternoons long gone—seven-hundred and sixty days since I had heard that song, for some strange, unnatural reason, at exactly 2.02pm, I heard it.
