Apple Core

Twenty Eight: RMS

I woke up in a cheap wooden high chair in my old house in the city, when I was younger. From the look of the place, and the lack of wrinkles on my fake mother's face, which was right in front of me, I could tell it was the early nineties.

"Open wide for the airplane!" said my fake mother, with a container of baby food in one hand and a plastic spoon in the other. Despite how she said she was caring, and wanted to save me from my older brother, my childhood still had its downsides; we were extremely, utterly poor.

It was yet another one of those memory-dreams. I opened my mouth to receive the spoonful, which tasted nothing like what it promised. Apples? It tasted nothing like them. How could babies eat this? And why on earth was I remembering the taste?!

I swallowed the goo I was forced to eat. I didn't have time for these types of dreams. I wanted to fall asleep, to wake up back in Circleton, but I didn't control my actions in those memories.

Finally, after several minutes of torture-like food, I found myself crying. My fake mother picked me up, wiped my mouth, and placed me in my cot, making sure to cover me with a blanket. In the seconds before I switched worlds, my words came back to me,

And you see on TV a person who killed their kid, or their mother. And your immediate reaction is, 'how could they do that?' But that thought is the problem, Derek. That one little thought that became their reality, turning them into a criminal. They say you are what you eat, but that's not true. You are what you think, because if you think about something too much, it becomes your reality, your entire life.

I woke up in Circleton, in the room where I had cried myself to sleep, but I wasn't breathing rapidly and covered in sweat; I understood. She thought she was doing the right thing, when she kidnapped me. And I can kind of understand that. After all, doesn't it apply to all of us?

Aren't we all just creatures roaming the earth, trying to do the right thing? We live our days smiling, but when night comes we lay in our beds thinking about the consequences of our actions and how we were created, always settling in the end on one major question, What is our purpose here?

Yet even after we ask ourselves that question once and twice and a million times, we still go through our days as if we have an infinite supply of them, not realizing that any day now a guy just like Chris Frevert could hit us with his car as he texted.

But we do live our days. We pretend they are never ending, but we live them, making memories and meeting new people. And when we face a choice we try to do the right thing. You might say now that there are those people, like my kidnapper, who chose to do what is wrong, but you must remember that people have different perspectives. To you it may be wrong, but to her, she was saving my life.

Perspective is something you should always keep in mind when socializing with other people. Because, simply, if we don't consider that other people see things differently than we do, we will forever live in a world where people have their backs turned to each other.

A desire to see her again and apologize spread through me, before I remembered the last words she said to me,

I see you as a son, and you have to get that through your head, because.. because they've agreed to hang me.

My heart sank. She was gone. Gone forever.

Just like Ralph.

I got up and walked into the room with the fish tank, remembering the taste of apple baby food in my mouth. As I watched them swim, I tried to stop thinking about my fake mother and to remove the guilt settling in my stomach. The sun was starting to rise behind the closed curtains. I needed to see a doctor about my memory-dreams, and I needed to see one as soon as possible.