Memory Lane

PART 01 » oblivion

For Kell (bateaux): You've been such a great pal since I've known and I'm so glad that you came into my life. Not to mention you're the queen of graphics and you're so amazing for helping me make my covers or else they would be awful.

Author's Note | Thank you so much for checking out my story. I know this first chapter is gonna be a bit rough because I'm not very used to writing like this, so I would appreciate it if you like and comment and tell me how I'm doing. Also, I can tell you now that it gets a lot better after this one. -Cal

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p a r t   o n e

o b l i v i o n

(n) • the state of being unaware or unconscious of what's happening

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THEY SAY THAT coming back is never easy.

Or at least those who left behind horrors and histories filled to the brim with despair would say as such. It was my mother who first told that to me, a woman who lost my father to a workplace accident and almost lost her mind along with it, and it came as an instinct to heed her words from birth. But time always came and went, seasons passed through cycles, and stars would fade and shine, but other things in life were never as cut and dry. Bad things happened to those who deserved them but so did brilliant things, the good died young but they also lived to old age — it was hard to but a price on certainty.

I was in the process of coming back now, I was coming back to the small town of Forester where I had grown up in, and I didn't want to brag but it was fairly easy. I had passed the small sign that read its name and population — merely 2500 people — on the stretch of road I had been down many times before, and it felt like second nature. My mother's words seemed to waft out of the open window along with the sound of my music as the sweet country air came in.

Normally, I would've stayed in the city like any other sane person, but there was work to be done here and I always found myself drifting off to the next thing that needed to be done. In this case, it was helping my mom pack up her overcrowded house and dump things off at the storage unit a couple blocks away. Ever since I went to college and unwillingly left her alone at home, she had developed a tendency to hold onto things that only held space hostage in her small house and no real world value except nostalgia.

But it was also good to find yourself back where you came from. Growing up in Forester was far from idyllic, but there were upsides to anything. I had met some amazing people here, tasted amazing food, and went to an amazing school just outside of the city limits where I had acquired the tools I needed to take me even further. Forester was good to me and coming back was almost a decision of the body and not the mind, almost like there was a part of me that was always drawn here — missing something.

Missing someone.

Well, I thought to myself, I would be seeing my mom again soon enough. I was deep into town now, and I had passed several landmarks of my childhood as well as graveyards of it; the old church of Saint Anne on Hanley Road that was still standing today despite every natural threat that came its way, what remained of Jo's (now closed) Ice Cream Parlor with a for sale signed tacked beside the front driveway, the kindergarten I went to had been repurposed into a town forum apparently.

Everything seemed to be the same, yet also different in the ways that counted. The only thing I knew I could count on was that my mom was her same old self.