[EDITORS' PICK]
Joyce Blackbird is a bored aspiring writer who just entered her adult years. The world around her frustrates her and disrupts her inspiration to write.
Chase Journey, musician, is the first person she's interested in. Through the cl...
When the morning turned into afternoon, the sun disappeared behind dark clouds that eventually produced rain.
Joyce sat on her bed with the notebook in her hands, staring at the window. The rain battering against it was the only sound she could hear that day. She usually found any kind of noise annoying, but this one happened to feel soothing.
The smell of the artificial cotton candy from Chase's vaping had stayed either in her room or in her mind. She scribbled some words on paper: It's raining outside but the clouds are inside.
She stared at that sentence, at times twisting her head, and then drew several straight lines over it.
She exhaled harshly and lay on the bed face down, burying her face in the pillow. She revisited Chase's words inside her head, her stomach fluttering like it did when he was there. She raised her head and brought the notebook under her field of vision, feeling the inspiration flowing.
Are we us at day or at night? Do we exist in the day just to cry at night, or do we cry at night just to exist in the day? Do I feel more like myself when the sun is up or in the moonlight? I smile and laugh and live during the day, but when the night comes, the darkness overwhelms me and I feel lifeless. At night, I find myself crying and despairing, wishing I could smile and laugh and live. But why do I wish for that, if it's exactly what I do every day? What, at night, I know for sure I'll be doing the next day and all I have to do is fall asleep and wake up to the light of day to have it. So is it all unreal? Is it all a fabrication? I am flowing downward and my made up world is collapsing at my feet as I question what's real and what isn't. I think I was about to give in to reality before someone alluded to a way to escape it.
A tiny smile changed the shape of the lip she was biting, when she spotted something on the floor near her bed with her peripheral vision.
It was a wallet. Chase's wallet. She found his I.D card inside it, even though the picture on it was probably taken decades ago. He had short hair and a hint of a goatee; he looked like another person.
She reached for her phone but, when she unlocked it, she realized he never gave her his phone number.
She murmured a 'dammit' as she inspected the contents of his wallet, hoping to find something with his number on it, but there were only ten dollars, his credit card, and a Walmart gift card.
Attached to the Walmart gift card was a piece of paper with an address written on it. She'd already heard of that street and knew it wasn't too far from there, so she decided to get dressed and go there in hopes of finding Chase's house.
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It was a bit chilly outside, but thankfully it'd stopped raining. The smell of rain on the sidewalk made her forget about the cotton candy that'd been stuck in her nostrils for hours.
It took no longer than fifteen minutes for her to get to the address. In front of her was a suburban house with nothing fancy about it. It looked abandoned, from the outside.
