Unattainable

It was 9.30 pm, an hour that suggested that the morning traffic jam would be over. Or at least that is what people who didn’t travel that boulevard every day thought. Everybody else knew perfectly well how busy this boulevard was and tried to avoid it as best as they could. However this one time there was a driver that had deliberately entered the traffic jam, fully aware of other alternative routes that could save her time. But she did not mind waiting. As she was waiting she would stare mesmerized by the thin layer of fog that was surrounding her and the other cars around her. It made the world appear even more grey than the early morning sun did, barely visible through the thick clouds above. Grey sky, grey horizon, grey mist in the distance, grey smoke rising from the cars’ exhaust pipes, the day was fading to a grey stillness, in which all she could sense was the music she was listening to, resonating in her mind.

She had planned this trip for a long time. And it was, really, a long time. The last time she had visited the place she was going to was a year and a half ago. Since then she had always imagined how she would go back there, walk the faintly familiar streets, see the faintly familiar landscapes, see this situation from a different angle and, hopefully, gather the strength to move on.

A year and a half passed before she could afford to go there. It was not the physical part of this trip that had been preventing her from doing it for so long. It was the psychological one. After having been trying for so long to forget how she had felt back then, now she wanted to remember again and to prove to herself that she was over it.

She was a little anxious and a little reluctant at the same time. She was not sure she remembered the way to go there, but once she had taken her seat in the car, she had found the determination to find her way at any cost. Thus she was slowly advancing through the traffic jam, her mind half-concentrated on thinking which way she should go, while the rest of her thoughts were following the landscape outside with a gloomy indifference. There were several buildings that she used as markers to guide her way through the seemingly identical streets until she took a right turning to find herself in a narrow street with no traffic, except for the parked cars that were resting on each side of the street, making it wide enough for only one car to go through.

She drove slowly, looking left and right, finding some slightly familiar objects, trying to determine which way she should go next. She had not come with a strict plan of where exactly she was going to go and where or whether she would park her car. She felt her heart go to her throat as she decided to park her car on a generally suitable place. She did so and got off the car, knowing that moving around would be easier if she was walking.

She would see buildings and streets, even bushes and trees that she found faintly familiar, that reminded her of a thought she was thinking while passing them by, or of things she was doing while going wherever she had been headed. She walked slowly, looking left and right, trying to absorb everything before her eyes. All that she had left before coming here were scattered images of places that she could not put together and now she would see them again, as clear as ever, fit into their place, and she would wonder how come she had forgotten them at all. She rediscovered something with each step, each turn, she was in a familiar place yet she did not know what lied ahead.

The memories and feelings that her walk recalled were sweetly nostalgic. She remembered having cheerfully walked this street, hurrying, anxious to reach the end of it. Or she would walk back where she had come from, dreamy, unconcerned by what surrounded her, hardly noticing the huge leaves of the bush on her right, or the miserable flowers that were growing between the tiles of the pavement. All of this now was a grey stillness, colored only by her memories of it. Without noticing, she had reached the end of the street and turned right, only to find herself on a children’s playground between two high panel buildings. The playground consisted only of several benches, a swing and a slide, but the sight of it was so familiar that she stopped dead in her tracks and could not stop staring at it. Memories started raining down on her like tropical precipitations that would lat only a few minutes, but would leave you wet for hours. She had not realized when the tears had come to her eyes, nor did she understand whether the familiar voice she heard was really calling her, or was just in her head summoned by the memories of this lost part of her life, a part that came and went like a dream, that had been so short and so unreal that she needed to come back to confirm its existence. She just stood there, remembering the most important lesson from her experiences for the last year and a half – she missed this life, because she could never have it, she wanted it so badly, because it was unattainable and she had forgotten it, just to be able to stop craving it. Only that when she had finally forgotten it, she had decided to come back, to remember once again what it was like.

The image used belongs to BlackCocktail on DeviantArt