Christopher’s View . ▲ †
There’s a tingly feeling in my head. Something I’ve never really felt before. I know what it is, though—it’s simply the feeling of knowing something is near, and knowing to go after it. It’s my natural instinct, my intuition.
I don’t even know what an intuition really is, anyway. I just know I feel it. You can’t knock me for that, can you?
I looked up the definition of intuition, and got this:
1. The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
2. A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
Pretty much, I’m borderline psychic. People don’t just have intuitions that easily. It’s something on a spiritual level, something most people can’t understand. It might even be religious…not that I’ve found an ideal religion for myself yet.
But besides that, my intuition has been speaking to me for a while now. I just haven’t been listening. For example, the time I saw the ghost after I went to the hospital for Ajahni. How do you explain that? I wasn’t high, I wasn’t sick, I didn’t have any food poisoning. It was my fucking intuition.
All I have to do is take what my intuition tells me and figure out what to do with it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with what the ghost told me. I’ve been thinking about it…the ghost was some form of Ajahni. But why did she come to me in a ghost form? Is she…?
No. She’s not dead.
I stopped thinking about that ghost, and started thinking about the tingling I feel in my head. Every inch, every fiber of my body is telling me the same thing. I’ve been thinking about him more, remembering him more…he’s here. He’s close to me.
“So all I have to do is find him.” I said aloud. I looked around cautiously. No one was around, so no one heard that. Good.
All I have to do is find him.
My lucky flashbacks about Forrest come in really handy, especially when I was walking around the neighborhood expecting him to pop out from somewhere. I had been discouraging myself when I realized that there was nowhere I could start looking for Forrest, except for everywhere.
But then a flashback came.
He always told me he wanted to move somewhere else, outside of California. Somewhere chill. The flashback I had was of a day when he finally realized a perfect place for him—Portland. I remember, from that day on he kept on talking about moving to Portland after he finished school.
So now that he’s probably finished school…where else could he be?
I bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to Portland, determined to reach who I wanted. I didn’t know how I would find him there, but I didn’t want to think about it on the bus. I just wanted to focus on the mission.
It was mainly Chinese people or unconcerned white people on the bus, so I was free from the reluctant stares I’d usually get from people who wanted to ask for an autograph but were too intimidated.
I was wearing my favorite sweater today, the black-and-white striped one with the bird on the front. I was wearing that same bandana, too. Anyone could look at my from miles away and say, “Hey, that’s Frank Ocean.” That’s not something I usually want, but if that ‘anyone’ could possibly be Forrest, it’s alright with me.
The bus ride took pretty long and it was getting more boring by the minute. But then an Asian lady with a face bathed in makeup came over to me and handed me some headphones and pointed to the little TV on the back of the seat in front of me. I took them and plugged them into the TV, instantly hearing a bunch of Reggaeton music coming through the headphones.
I laughed silently. It reminded me of one summer in high school, where that music was so popular…
Nah, no flashback here. Just remembering the good times. I turned the volume up and closed my eyes, with intentions of waking up at our next gas stop.
“Christopher…Christopher. Mr. Ocean, come on. Mr. Ocean. Christopher…”
I twisted and turned in my sleep, and then woke up to a tiny, beautiful face looking at me. I definitely slept over my limit.
She had short, blonde-brown curly hair, a skinny nose, thin lips, and pretty eyes…Her skin looked pretty, too. It was Ajahni.
It was Ajahni’s face, of course, but I wasn’t stupid enough to actually think it was Ajahni. I was just seeing her face on another woman again. I squeezed my eyes open and shut a few times, and then saw that same Asian lady’s face.
“Finally, you wake, eh? Get up, go out. Portland here. You have to leave bus.” She said in broken English. I looked around the bus that once had a person or two in every section of seats. Now it was completely deserted besides me and the workers.
I gathered my things and let the woman rush me off of the bus. As it pulled away, leaving me all of its polluting fumes, I examined the place I was in. The buildings weren’t tall. They were short and stubby, kind of like Mexican people. There were pizza shops and pubs here and there, and cozy supermarkets all over.
This would be much cooler if the bus dropped me off in some futuristic Japan-looking place with robotic cars and people dressed in warrior gear with afros.
I don’t know what Forrest was thinking.
I walked a few blocks, strolling around and enjoying the bland scenery. I was also looking out for people that looked like Forrest, or Ajahni, or anyone that caught my attention. I didn’t find anyone, but I saw a record store. Since there was nothing else I could really do at the moment, I walked into the store and searched its racks for the best Reggaeton discs I could find.
“You like that type of music?” The scrawny, toothpick-chewing store attendant asked me. I looked at him and then back at the records.
“Yeah, I guess. You have any James Brown?” I asked. He nodded over to the aisle next to me, as if to say, “It’s right there, right in your face.”
I thanked him and picked up the CD I knew Forrest had liked. Maybe this stuff would cheer me up. When I was finished making my final decisions on the records, I followed the white boy back to the counter so he could ring them up for me.
“You know of any decent hotels I could stay at?” I asked as he scanned each record carefully.
“Yeah. There’s one called the Viceroy. It’s a bootleg of the real one down in Miami. You could stay there. What, you ain’t got no one else to shack up with?”
I shook my head. “No girl, if that’s what you’re thinking. That’s kind of what I came here to look for.”
The small talk only continued for a few moments afterward, and then I took my music and left. He was nice enough to copy down the address of the Viceroy for me on my receipt. It wasn’t too far from the record store. Convenient.
When I got there, I realized that the Viceroy was a motel rather than a hotel. I didn’t mind. It was somewhere to sleep, at least.
The people there were nice. Well…either they were nice or just didn’t care much to put on a show. I was given a room key by a fat lady to room 1F. I took my bag there. It was small and had a sweaty stench to it. Like I said, it was at least somewhere to sleep. The smell was worse in the bathroom; I stomached it long enough to take a shower. After my shower I went back out to the counter to ask the fat lady for a Yellowpages book.
I went back to the room with the book, and that’s when the work started. I had to remember. I had to remember Forrest’s real name. Why can’t I remember it? If I loved him so much, I should be able to remember his name, shouldn’t I?
I flipped through the pages with hope of finding other names that would lead me to his. All these names were foreign to me, and didn’t ring a bell. I went page-by-page, and didn’t find anything. Then I got sick of it and skipped all the way to the last page. Before I slammed the book shut, I looked at one of the last names on the last few pages.
Solomon, Roshon.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Hell yes. That’s it. That was his name. I used to call him Richy because he hated his first name, and I thought he looked like a Richy. I don’t know how I started calling him Forrest, though.
But I know his name was Roshon. And I have his number and address right at my disposal.
All I need to do is call.