As soon as the nurse left the room, Filipe took the cigarette to his lips and lit it with the old lighter. He coughed violently two seconds later.
Definitely, he wasn’t a smoker. At least now he was sure of it.
That was one of the few certainties he’d had since the crash, and he hung on to it. After all, someone who doesn’t remember anything to experiences as he has them. Especially the ones that tell him something about who he is.
He looked at the pile of old archive boxes they’d brought him, supposedly from his house. “I don’t know if it’s my house, I don’t remember ever setting foot in it, but ok.”
Filipe tried to drive the thought away. He chose one of the fifty boxes at random and opened it.
“Apparently I like to write…”
The box was full of loose pages, some with drafts of ideas, some with complete stories. He opened another box, and another, and another, and the content was similar in all of them. Pages and pages with clearly autobiographical texts, articles of magazines written by him, full stories and unfinished ones. All about different topics, from sex and love to colonies in another planets, to personal meditations and interviews with weird people.
Many of the texts were too short or generic to know if they were fact or fiction. But Filipe knew that lost in that gigantic word puzzle was a good part of his past. He had no idea how to put it together.
Filipe spent hours lost in those fifty boxes, and then he made a decision. He emptied them all on the floor, took the lighter to the pile, and burned everything in one go.
Without putting the lighter out, he lit a cigarette.
He didn’t cough this time. On the contrary, he sighed with relief.
“Screw it,” he thought, letting himself smile. “I didn’t smoke? I do now. The rest doesn’t matter.”
----
LIKED THIS STORY? Then check out the book LOOSE THREADS, out now at http://www.luisfilipealves.com/loosethreads, and come back every week for selected short stories from the upcoming LOOSE THREADS 2.
OR BETTER YET, to know instantly when I put up another story, or to know when my books are coming out, SIGN UP FOR ME RIGHT NOW, my weekly newsletter, at www.luisfilipealves.com/merightnow
And most importantly, THANK YOU for reading.
