KARMA

2,553 Days. . .

Chapter 1 - 2,553 days

2,553 days. . .

What goes around, comes around...

It's a proverb that holds true to her heart. It's accurate. Very much so. It's real. Her reality. It's factual. Again, it is what her life has become now.

Sadly, she's living proof of her own salacious actions. It's the downfall, the consequence of feeling oh-so lonely that one melancholy night.

But, technically, it wasn't only that one night she had felt so lonely, it had been months and months too long. A repetition of going to bed alone with half a bottle of Cabernet in her system. A repetition of staying at the hospital longer than any of them should. A repetition of how was your day, asking without an intent of listening or even caring - habitual. Routine, it was what's expected and that was that. And that night was her undoing, a lapse of judgement.

Karma.

What else can she say other than karma's a real bitch.

It's a Hindu and Buddhist belief, stating that the sum of a person's actions determine the person's next incarnation in samsara, also called, the cycle of death and rebirth.

The concept had fascinated her. She had learned it on her trip to India with her parents a very long time ago, some two decades ago. It was one of the handful of trips her parents had decided to take her and her brother along with them.

Cause and effect.

How can a life be determined by the direct result, whether be it good or bad, of a previous life?

Good deeds results in happiness and prosperity for the next life. Bad deeds contributes sadness and future suffering.

What we experience now is the result of our own past's actions and our future is a function of our own choice and making.

If that's the case then she loathes previous-life-Addison for banishing her with eternal suffering. But then that means next-life-Addison will also be condemned to forever hell for she is not a good person. She's a fucking horrible person. And this is her punishment, being stuck in this box - somewhat in a literal and figurative sense.

She wondered what previous-life-Addison had done. What had she done so bad for she to suffer her wrath? Had she too slept with her husband's best friend?

Immense sorries to all future Addisons.

She's apologising in advance since she can only imagine the misery her future-self will have to endure.

Tied to eternal suffering.

Addison laid awake on the squeaky and rusty single bed that barely suffices her Amazonian legs. It was just enough and just enough wouldn't have ever been in her vocabulary. She don't think she've ever slept on a single mattress before. All the beds she've slept on had more than enough length for her long legs, more than enough room for two bodies, more than enough space to stretch. This child-like size bed didn't come with any of that comfort.

Double. Queen. King. California king. Now, that's a word in her vocabulary bank that she'd like to use more often.

But that was more than seven years ago.

Everyone - family, husband, friends, colleagues - must have forgotten her already.

Derek probably had a long time ago.

Her parents, she don't think her parents had even noticed.

Mark, she was just his fling, a one night stand to him.