Two Theresa's

   Theresa had just come out of the asylum. She wasn’t supposed to call it that but she found it was better to call things by their name. She had been there for five months, after suffering a very serious mental breakdown in her office. Thing had been thrown, insults had been hurled and the police had to be called to stop her from hurting more people. Things had really gone badly that day and she had to accept, in front of a judge, the condition of getting help in the insane asylum.

 Her stay there had been largely uneventful, except for the screams she had to hear every single night, that prevented her from sleeping like a normal person. Besides that, she had to go to the shrink every single day, for an hour, and also to group therapy once a week. It was a lot of talking, of listening and of showing others how she felt and looking at people hurting from their pasts or presents. It was kind of tiring at the beginning, but it eventually became part of the routine.

 Same happened with the meds. Her doctor had assigned a certain prescription to her at first, but then it was change several times during her stay in the asylum. The things she had to take, with a little sip of water, kept getting stronger. She had begun losing grip of reality. After having a crisis in her cell, she decided to leave the meds and just pretend she was taking them. It wasn’t easy because they checked everyone afterwards, but she was able to make one of her new friends take them.

 The first week she spent outside of the asylum, she realized how mean that had been. Making someone unstable taker her meds could have been potentially destructive for said person and maybe even for herself. However, she knew that those chemicals would have never helped her at all. She just needed to get away from everything, she needed silence and calm, as well as some time away from everything that bothered her, starting with her job and her family. In short, she needed some sort of holiday.

 That’s why she liked to tell people that her stay in the asylum had been uneventful, just something he had to do in order to please the society that had deemed her unfit to be in society. She tried to fake her hatred of the system and decided to get a job that wouldn’t be as stressful as the one she had before. Over two months after her release, Theresa was able to get employed in a flower shop, taking care of the plants and also attending costumers when the owner wasn’t around. It was a very calm environment, perfect for her. Free of stress and fear.

 However, her family was still around maybe even more than before. Theresa had tried hard to make them understand she needed time for herself, in order to get well again. But they didn’t care about that at all. They were too busy thinking about how others would perceive them. Her mother had many friends all over the city and she had even received some gossip about her own daughter that Theresa just refused to discuss. She had no need or urge to comment on any of it with her mother.

 Her father had been dead for a couple of years and her mother and siblings would always say, when she was around, that it was better that way in order for her not to shame the family name and her father’s prestige in front of the rest of the community. They behaved as if they were kings and queens or something very similar. It was a relief when Donna, the owner of the flower shop, asked her to go for a short period of time to the small town from where she received the flower shipments.

 Apparently, they had been having problems with some of the plants and they needed to get them in line because Valentine’s Day was coming soon and that was their big day of the year for sales. Theresa had shown so much interest in the business and in the plants as themselves, that Donna thought it would be perfect to send her to represent the company. She would have to visit several plantations and tell them exactly what they were looking for, in order to improve sales and wealth for everyone involved.

 She accepted the moment Donna proposed her plan to her. She left a week later, without telling her family or anyone else. She just grabbed a suitcase and hopped on the bus. She arrived there and discovered how beautiful real nature was, how calm really looked and how people lived without so much tension from urban life. She hadn’t realized how her rough lifestyle had been an important factor in the development of her emotional crisis. City life almost killed her.

 When she arrived, Theresa was supposed to stay up to three weeks in the town, travelling to other parts of the region every day. However, she ended up staying more than two months. She only came back to help Donna with all the craziness of Valentine’s Day. Once the season ended, she went back to the countryside. No one ever knew what she did there but the truth was that she had been hired to do the same thing she did in the flower shop. The only difference was that she did it in the open; with real sunlight caressing her skin and that was priceless.

 Her family looked for her through email, mobile and telephone, but they never got to her because she had taken a step back from most of the things the modern world could offer. She visited an Internet café once a week to read some news and chat with Donna and other friends, but that was mostly it for her technological life. Most days were spent in the fields, sweating from early morning to sundown. It was hard work but she loved feeling so tired that no thoughts ran through her mind.

 She would be the first person to wake up, feed the chickens and pigs and then help in the field, doing whatever they asked her to do. She loved tending to roses, sunflowers and dahlias, but she would also work on a potato plantation and picking strawberries and grapes. It was always changing but it was good money for only one person. She eventually got to save enough to have her own little house, from were she could travel by foot to any of her jobs, no matter what she had to do.

 Before her breakdown she had been one of those women that never touched anything without a real necessity. She had a chauffeur to pick her up from her meetings and then take her back home or to the office. She had a maid to cook for her and two assistants that helped her much more than she would admit to. She would be very cold to all of them. Cold wouldn’t be the word as she was never outright mean, she just wasn’t one of those people that liked to hang out with others.

 Looking back at her past, she thought that woman in her memories was someone she couldn’t really recognize. That woman, through some sort of creep psychological magic, had been locked away in the asylum, with all the other crazy people. She was a danger to herself and others and it had been quite a difficult task to get rid of her. Because, before anything else, Theresa had to realize how bad everything was before taking the road to a better life, which is exactly what she did.

 Eventually, she met someone she was able to fall in love with. He was the first person there, in the countryside, to know who she had been and how much she had changed. He praised her for that and acknowledged her might every day of their life together.

 As for her mother and siblings, they kept trying to reach her but she never went back to the city. She just wrote them a letter telling them how her life was now much better than before and she had no need to go back to a place so toxic for her.

The day he wanted to be someone else

   Trying to sleep on that big room was an impossible task. Not only the windows had cracks that let the cold wind of the night in, the stone floor prevented anything to be very warm, even under the covers. It was a dreadful place to stay for a night and John had to stay there for, at least, a whole week. It had not been his choice to go on such a remote place for a vacation. If it had been for him, he would have stayed in his cozy tiny apartment, with his cat Michael.

 But a letter had come on the mail telling him to wait for its writer during that week. It didn’t specify a date and the only thing he could learn out of it was that, whoever had wrote the letter, he or she knew a lot about him and about his family. In three pages, he wrote things that only a family member would know. It was very eerie but John had a sister and a brother, so his first reaction was to think it was one of them, or maybe even his parents, who would be most likely to actually written a letter in paper.

 After finishing the letter he emailed his family and told them it was a very funny joke, especially with his birthday approaching, but they all responded that same day telling him they had nothing to do with a letter. They even joked that the world was too advanced for such thing and that they hadn’t touched a piece of paper or a ballpoint pen in years. And to be honest, John hadn’t done either of those things either in a long time. Paper and pens where only in banks. So who was behind all of it?

 He decided not to respond and just doing nothing. Maybe it had been mailed to him by mistake or maybe it was just a very bad joke. There are people in the world that don’t really have a good sense of humor. Many have a deviant kind of humor that only a few people understand and sometimes only them. But the letter was not even funny, on any level. Maybe it was just a random thing, someone hoping to get a reaction out of the blue. It was possible, John said to himself.

 However, as the dates in the letter grew closer, John received another letter. It had the same kind of calligraphy but this time it was way shorter, more concise and had a certain air of urgency. The person that had written knew that it was difficult to believed someone that knew him so well was written but it clarified that it was a matter of life and death. The letter begged for John to go to where it was indicated and wait there for more information. He had to trust his instinct. And then the letter finished with a simple but resonating phrase: “You have to come because you need to close that chapter for good”.

 That really scared John. He had never discussed his past with anyone else. Not even his family knew everything that had happened to him when he was younger, the things he did when he was out of the house. John had always been the kind of child to stay behind, to have a small amount of friends and prefer to play with toys or videogames at home instead of going outside. But he did try to be another kind of person and it was then when it all happened. The trip reminded him of everything.

 He arrived to that sad hotel the day the week indicated in the letter began. He had to ask for a special permit in his office, permit that was strangely granted very fast. It was not very common for him or anyone else there to get permission to leave for a whole week that easily. The whole situation felt really strange, as if someone else had had some sort of hand in the whole matter. It was a very scary situation but he decided to ignore those facts and just do what he felt he had to do.

 The hotel was the only one in that small town, located about three hours away by road. As he had decided a long time ago not to drive a car, he had to take the bus and that experience was worse than anything because of the delays and all of the walking he had to do. It wasn’t that he hated walking around or anything, more that he really didn’t wanted to move more than necessary for whoever had lured him to that far away place. The town was made of maybe twenty blocks, more or less.

 The hotel felt more like a cemetery than nothing else. The only difference was the fact that there was a roof over his had. Aside from that, you could really feel the same kind of cold weather; the same ripe smell all over and that very sad light that makes you feel unhappy about being alive. The second day there, he woke up rather early. After a cold shower, he decided to walk around town and hope he could find the person he was looking for right then. Or should that be the other way around?

 The cold wind was powerful, descending from a mountain range that seemed to be really close. A woman in the grocery store told him the temperature was always the same every single day of the year. No summer days, even if the sunny was high up above them. The rays of sunlight also felt cold in that part of the world. She also realized John was a visitor and she recommended him to go to the nearby hills for some fresh air. She assured him it was much less depressing than the small town. Hearing her say that, gave him a little bit of hope, which felt out of place.

 He went to the hills every single day, for the next few days. On day six, he decided to leave the following morning very early. All that time in such a small town was making him insane. He wanted to hear noise again, to hear babies complaining and people being awful to each other in the street. He wanted to hear the sound of cars and planes and trains and he wanted to have his cat Michael next to him to warm up his feet before going to bed. He didn’t belong there.

 That day, he walked all over the place and stayed in the hotel lobby for at least three hours after lunch in order for his so-called host to come and tell him what it was that he knew, what the hell he wanted to speak with him about. He waited and waited, hearing the sound of the clock and the snoring of the man that tended the front desk. He wanted that awful week to end and was furious to have been made to spend one of his legal holiday weeks in such a sad a depressing town.

 In the afternoon, he headed off to the hills again. He did like to see the landscape, the mountain and a river far away. Sometimes there were some sheep around and he loved to caress them. That day they came again and he wanted to touch them one last time but they left suddenly, as a figure wearing a large overcoat walked towards him. It was a man, a very frail looking man, maybe the same age as he was. When he was closer, John was able to see a scar above one of his eyebrows.

 Then, he gasped and walked back a bit, scared of this vision of the past. Even without saying a word, he knew who that person was. As a teenager trying to get people to like him and having friends, John had stolen the keys to one of his classmates’ parents’ car. It had been done on a dare. He had to steal the keys and drive the car down the road. It was a short trip, a crime without victim. Or so he thought. The man standing in front of him was the kid he had run over that day, so many years ago.

 He had always thought the kid was dead. He had left them there, on the pavement, to die. He had turned around the car and left it at that. He always thought the police would find him. But nothing ever happened and John eventually learned not to think about that day.

 And yet, there he was, the victim of his attempts to be a normal kid. John wanted to be someone else and all he could produce was a horrible accident. His victim had traced him down for a long time and had been watching, waiting for his moment to come forward.

Words from within

   I have found myself without words, without a real need to speak out, to talk to anyone. I find every person to be utterly dull, to be devoid of anything really interesting to say, of anything that means something to me. Granted, it is my fault and my perception. I cannot explain why it happens and exactly how, but I realize it is something that is part of me and I cannot shake it off and continue my path through this world. Is not as simple as many people things. Demons are stronger, always.

 That does not mean they win every single time. It means the battles are always hard, filled with blood and sweat. And you will lose some of them, hopefully the ones that don’t really matter. If you lose, you learn. And that’s always good but not really. Because when you learn you have to have a good brain inside your skull. If you don’t, well, learning all you want won’t change a thing. You will always have a narrow-minded view of the world and that may not be the best in your life.

 I have learned a lot of things, I believe, both useful and useless. I know the names of all countries in the world and their capital cities but I have no idea how to use numbers beyond the most essential calculations. I know some things, here and there, about some of the world’s personalities, about animals and things all over the cosmos. But I have no idea what love is or what responsibility means for most of the people. I don’t even know if I want to know, but it’s clearly frowned upon.

 Not talking in a world that yells at you every single second of the day could even be dangerous. How to counter all of that crap that enters your ears and body? By talking, by having opinions and thinking. I do all that except the talking because I have found myself noticing there’s no one there to actually listen. And talking is only worth something when someone is listening and maybe they change their views on a subject because of what you said. That’s not happening to me.

 Granted, I’m not saying every single thing I say is worth something, anything for that matter. But I have realized that, as humans, we do need to be listened and for people to care, in any way possible. We need to feel we matter, that the world would be different if we suddenly disappeared. Sadly enough, the world wouldn’t really change if I died now, only a small fraction of it and only for a small amount of time. That’s not drama but a reality and the truth is not always something we want to listen to. But truth does not care about us, only about what is.

 Yet, I may be too much of a drama queen. Maybe every single thing that I’m thinking and writing right now is just in my mind. Maybe I’m worth much more than I feel to, maybe the world would change if I died right this moment. But something in me does not think so. Something inside of me, in my heart or brain or lungs, is trying to tell me that I’m hollow and that I simply don’t matter. Because another truth is that we don’t all matter and we’re just too afraid to realize that.

 So many billions of humans have lived, many more are alive right now and others are being born right now and in the future. Of all that cluster of human souls, only some of them really matter in some way. Maybe they discovered something or they made feel people good. It is possible they fought wars or their love, branded by words, transcended the borders of speech and time and truth. But those people are such a small group in such a vast amount of people. Just people.

 Yes, we all matter to someone, in a way. We all have parents and sisters and brothers and more family. Many have daughters and sons, lovers and pets. There’s always someone that remembers you. However, that may not be enough to some of us, especially when life has decided to make your life different, to make you the one to go through a path that not many people travel. And you don’t feel honored at all because it pisses you off how you feel like a gamble.

 I don’t speak that much because I hate my life. I don’t hate the people in it, because they have done their best. That’s another truth. But I do fucking hate that I have learned so much and really know so little. I hate that this world doesn’t seem to have a place for me. Each second that passes the air around me seems to be getting thinner and thinner. In some ways, I feel like an astronaut that has started drifting away from the spaceship and only has a limit amount of time left.

 I hear the clock ticking and ticking, passing too fast. Because people think there’s torture when time goes slow but that’s not the real nightmare. It is much worse when hours and minutes and days and years pass in the blink of an eye and you feel you’re still in the exact same place, as everyone else moved around and achieved so much. And you, me in this case, are drifting away more and more. Alarms make sounds all around you but there’s nothing really you can do besides waiting. You try to reach, to live, but life doesn’t really want you anymore.

 That’s how it feels. It feels as if you’re drowning slowly and no one should live through that. Not physically or figuratively. We don’t deserve to be killed in the slowest of fashions, as the world looks at us and judges us for not being brave enough to do things that we have no idea how to do. This world is wild, is a rabid animal that has to be tamed. It’s just a savage beast that wants more and more and more and we cannot all comply with its wishes. Maybe we’re too weak.

 That’s a factor, I guess. We might be too weak for this life or, at least, for the way we handle ourselves and everything around us. I find myself to weak write anything more right now. Every single thing takes a toll on our heads and it’s just too difficult to try to handle everything at the same time. It’s too hard and we’re not the same people that before, year ago. Those rugged men and women are not here anymore, maybe in some places thought. Most of us surrendered to our feelings.

 I just wanted you to think a little bit about the state of your mind, about how you really feel and how you live. Reality is a bitch but it’s the one we have to live in for the time we remain on this planet.

 If you can, help someone else live through this. If you can, help me.

A life of risk

   Natalya stopped by the hotel only for a few minutes, enough time to pick up whatever she had brought along with her to that damn place and then get out of there as fast as she could. She put it all in a small suitcase with wheels and practically ran down to the reception in order to pay whatever she owed. It wasn’t something she did often, but she had been made to pay for dinner in her room, as her target had not being available that night. He was too far for her to follow him as he had to.

 The woman asked for her receipt. As she was grabbing her wallet to pay the reception man, she realized something in just a few seconds: a man wearing all black had suddenly stood up in the living room in front of the reception. Almost at the same time, a tall woman with hair as white as snow, had entered the hotel almost as if she was the impersonation of the wind. Their presence made Natalya feel nervous. Something was going to happen, she just knew it. She extracted two bills from her wallet and tried to seem innocent.

 The moment the reception man received the bills from her hands, Natalya heard the first shot behind her. As fast as she was, it had been impossible to save her luggage entirely. She pulled to the left just in time and then ran away from the lobby area, trying to get away from the scene as fast as possible. Screams came from the area she had just been in and she knew there were bodies there. One of them was probably the young man that had given her that damn dinner’s receipt.

 It was difficult to run with boots on but Natalya was very agile and fast. So fast, that people in the kitchens were surprised to see her run past them, minutes before the two assassins would come running after her. She was fortunate enough to find an exit through the depot were fresh vegetables and meat were received every morning from various markets around the city. She ran past workingmen carrying big crates and didn’t stop until she actually saw traffic and passersby.

 The hotel was located on the most sought out part of the city, where all luxury commerce had found a spot to lure everyone. Not only people that could actually afford to buy any of that stuff but also the ones who liked to see what opportunities others had in life. As it was a Saturday afternoon, the place was packed. The main street of that area was filled with families and couples, with tourists and salary men and women trying to find a good place to have a beer and maybe do something else afterwards. And among them was Natalya, running for her life.

 She knew she had to hide but the first thing to do was to know where her assailants were. Both of them were pretty easy to pick out in a crowd but the street was so crowded and Natalya was substantially smaller than most people. That had always worked in her advantage but it could also be something of a hurdle. She decided to enter a clothing store and run upwards, towards the tallest point of the structure. Sure enough, one could get a great view from the area from the men underwear section.

 A young woman looked at her and asked if she could help her. Natalya was breathing heavily. She tried to smile and said she was just looking for some boxers for her husband. The young woman smiled back and attempted to show some of the newest models to Natalya. The woman stopped her by saying she was going to look around first and then decide on something. The young lady nodded and told her that she could look around all that she wanted, even in the changing rooms.

 The girl walked away leaving Natalya confused. What had she meant? She turned around quickly, remembering why she was inside of the store. Sure enough, she saw the silver mane of the woman that had killed so many people in the hotel just minutes ago. In the distance, Natalya could hear the sound of several ambulances, probably rushing to the place. She hoped the body count was low, as those people had nothing to do with everything that was happening. It was all her fault.

 She started wandering around the store, in order to not look suspicious. She looked at some male underwear, some of them with fun textures and prints but she wasn’t really interested. She was remembering what had happened just over a day ago, when she had stolen a series of documents from a rich man’s mansion, a very rich man that was suspected to have links with several terrorists groups that would give him the advantage if they were capable of reaching the higher spheres of power.

 Natalya had been sent to retrieve the information, as the people that had hired her had an interest in it. She had been ordered to copy everything she had and take it back herself to be given in person. They had also asked her not to use the Internet, make phone calls or even talk to any people beyond the necessary communication. Then, she remembered the young boy from the hotel and realized a tear had come down her face. As she cleaned it off her face, she felt something warmer. Natalya realized what the young woman had meant before, about the changing rooms.

 She walked down one floor and entered the changing rooms with a blouse and a skirt she had grabbed without even properly looking at them. She was assigned a stall and it was then when she realized that one of the bullets had come way closer than she had imagined. The projectile had burned her cheek, leaving a red line below her right eye. She still had her purse hanging around her body, so she took out some tissues and tried to clean her face as thoroughly as she was able to.

 Natalya came out of the store half an hour after she had entered. She decided the best thing to do was to get to the airport. Her flight was still some hours away and it was a priority to get the information back safe. After all, her business was danger and that wasn’t the first time she had been shot or had actively been targeted by someone. She walked for a bit until she found a big avenue. There, she stopped a taxi and asked to be taken to the airport. The man had doubts but she paid up front.

 Arriving in the airport, Natalya thought that it was possible that she could be getting older. She was not the same age as when she had first entered that line of work. She had been trained and recruited because she was agile, both mentally and physically. But now she felt as if everything was getting a little bit too fast for her. Besides, she kept thinking about the boy in the hotel and that had never been an issue before. She had seen many bodies in her life but had never been specially affected by them.

 After checking-in, she rushed to the security checkpoint as her flight was leaving in less than twenty minutes. However, she stopped the moment she saw that damn blonde hair again. And it was impossible to run away from that situation. So she pulled the gun hiding in her purse and started shooting. Everyone around was screaming and running but the two women were just hunting for each other. They were doing what they had been doing for years and it was too late for them both to stop.

 Both ran out of bullets and a physical confrontation ensued. Punches were thrown back and forth. But then, experience appeared in the form of a selfie-stick lying on the floor. Some scared tourist had just left it there, in the middle of the shooting.

 Natalya grabbed it, removed the part that holds the camera with a powerful pull and then impaled the blonde woman with it. The warm blood on her hand made her feel alive but also scared. She had never been scared before and it couldn’t be the best of signs. Not right then.