Notes

Assignment: write a story based on three mundane objects to choose from. I chose: Chanel lipstick, old train ticket and photograph.

Warning: major character death, suicide.


Stuck in Memory Lane

Regina has taken this train every day, on her way to work, always in the same seat, stuck in a loop for the past thirty-something years, as if she's living in a fantasy novel where time stands still and she's the only one who realises that they're reliving the same day over and over again, with no end in sight, picturing herself as that young girl full of hopes and dreams, still childishly optimistic. She knows she's not though. The hard truth hits her every time she spots the aging lines of her face—worry lines definitively gracing her forehead, a frown permanently set between her eyebrows, and crow's feet showing themselves more evidently every day.

The battered old photograph always finds its way into her hands; her fingers grazing over the ink that forms a young, blonde man. The dents and creases in the paper representing the lines in her face and scars in her heart, painted there as persistently as the fold lines in the paper.

She closes her eyes. Remembering, dreaming, seeing his smiling face in front of her as if he is physically there and she can touch him, his eyes sparkling, his mouth a bit crooked in that mischievous grin she loves so much.

With a sigh she opens her eyes again and looks outside, seeing the landscapes pass by her in a blur, but her focus is on the reflection of her own face in the window. Frowning, sad eyes stare back at her, and she wonders if that look will ever go away.

She quickly looks away and swallows the lump in her throat. She opens her bag and searches for her Chanel lipstick in the hopes to hide her true feelings behind a layer of makeup and designer clothes—as she has done for the past three decades. But her hand finds her wallet instead and she opens it, the flap falling backwards, out of sight, as she places the picture back inside, but still visible, and she traces her finger over the familiar train ticket she bought excitedly all those years ago.

"You have a beautiful family."

She looks up at the middle-aged smiling woman across from her, who is looking at the upside-down picture in her wallet. She turns the flap back up and stares at the familiar faces of her greying husband and adolescent children. "Thank you."

She looks at the representation of her life in her wallet: the picture of her past that she never got to live next to the living and breathing family of her present that she created.

"My husband and I were never so lucky to have children."

She smiles at the woman, hoping she looks sincere, but it is not genuine. She should feel lucky, but she doesn't. Forever stuck in the past.

When she gets off at the next stop, there's that instant flutter in her stomach that she will see him soon, that he is waiting to pick her up, but as always, the butterflies turn into heavy stones of disappointment when it hits her that he is gone. He has moved on, and so should she, if not for herself, then for the family she is lucky to have, for her children. They deserve a mother who lives in the here and now.

She wants to. She needs to.

She has tried for decades, but she can't. She is stuck on the same day, stuck on the past, stuck on him.

Something needs to change. It's time.

So the next day, she doesn't get on that train. The next day, she jumps.

And she can finally move on.