When We Were Mortals

by E. S. Mercer

  When We Were Mortals

  E.S. Mercer

  When We Were Mortals by E.S. Mercer Copyright © 2017 E.S. Mercer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design done by author using © Canva.com Editing by: Dare to Dream Editing

  ISBN-10: 1542490146 ISBN-13: : 978-1542490146

  DEDICATION

  Thank you to my friends and family and their amazing support through this journey. I truly could not have completed this without you. To my cheerleaders, behind the scenes and all around me, you kept me going…you allowed me to believe in myself and the process.

  "I speak to you with the hope that you are listening. Listening to the voices in the wind. The voices that tell you who and what you are. The things you choose to deny within yourself and refuse to see in others.”

  My Love, There are so many things that I neglected to tell you before leaving this earth and I wish so badly I had found the time to say them. I know none of this will make sense to you at first, but know that someday you will understand why I had to do what I did.

  Everything in my life, whether I remembered it or not, led me to that very moment. The moment where I had to choose between walking the earth with you side by side, or fulfilling the destiny set out for me long ago. In the end, it was a choice I made easily, knowing that you would be safe and free to live your life as you so chose.

  It took me a long time to understand what I came here to do. To understand how important you were to the end of my story and how the sacrifices you made, helped me to get here. Or to understand how each person placed in our life is put there for a reason you yourself may not understand until it is too late.

  So, I say thank you. Thank you for loving me more than I could ever have asked for. Thank you for sticking by me when it didn’t always seem easy. Thank you for loving me when in the end, I couldn’t give you what you asked for. But know that I always loved you and I always will.

  When I am gone and you feel lost, just remember, I have loved you unconditionally since the moment you walked into my life. Everything I have done is for you. No matter what obstacles were put in our way, we overcame the. Even now, as I am gone, I will still always be with you. I will always love you and I will always protect you.

  I leave you my story so that you may tell the world. If anything happens, and everything we fought for is for naught, give them the knowledge they so desperately deserve and give them the chance to know the truth. In the original model, they were never supposed to know. They were never supposed to see past the horizon of their mortality. But the fact that they will know will make them smarter, stronger and in the end--your ally as you continue my work. It is your job to tell the world the truth.

  And finally... “Though the sun shall no longer shine on my face, know that it’s warmth carries with it my love for you. As the wind no longer flutters through my hair, it will carry the message of faith I have in you. As the rain no longer cleanses my skin, it will feed your thirst for me. Feel my lips forever on yours with each word you speak, feel my arms around you with each rise of the moon and know that I am forever with you.”

  Love Always and Forever, Evangeline

  Chapter I

  I have tried so many times to understand where this all started. There were no memories of a childhood – good or bad. I couldn’t remember what high school I attended or who my first kiss was. For years, I tried to understand who I was and nothing I experienced made it any easier for me.

  Something wasn’t right. There was something that haunted me to my core. Those gut feelings I had that I was something other than what I had always believed myself to be were somehow reinforced by little encounters or visions or even dreams.

  If I was to sit here and try to recall the first true memory I had, it would have to be my 26th birthday. I remember waking up in a panic to a scene that oozed much more than the desperation and agony it intended. Empty pill bottles lay strewn across the bed with a pill here and there, placed perfectly out of reach, as if the entire stage was set for opening day. The bottle of rum that rested in my unsuspecting right hand, glared mockingly at me. It was near empty and yet I couldn’t smell any alcohol on my breath.

  Even in the obvious overshadowing of the evening darkness, I could see an overused Happy Birthday sign dangling from the defective ceiling tiles as a mutilated birthday cake stood sadly on the table across the one room apartment.

  I honestly couldn’t remember what got me to this point – why I would attempt such a thing. The feeling in my gut told me to fight, but looking around me, I could tell that fighting wasn’t something I was used to doing.

  What I saw and what I felt didn’t seem to coincide. At first, I kept fading in and out as if my body was refusing to play the part. The pain I could feel in the middle of my back complimented the pain I now felt in my head. Flashes of memories that didn’t feel like mine were pounding against my subconscious, causing me to nearly pass out.

  I felt drowsy but not drugged. I felt hopeless but not enough to give up. I felt lost, yet knew there was a better way. I sat up in the bed, dropping the bottle of rum on the floor, shattering it into big, ugly, jagged pieces. Ignoring the mess, I tried to brush off the obvious suicide attempt and focus my filmy, untrustworthy eyes around the room.

  As I scanned the room, I found nothing but evidence of the destitute and miserable life I was trying to escape. That was until I made it to the farright corner of the kitchen.

  There, in the shadows cast by the fridge against the penetrating rays of the city street lights, I could see a faceless man screaming a name I could barely hear and didn’t recognize.

  He stood still, his arms reaching out towards me; he kept screaming. Still too delirious to move, I made the mistake of leaping off the side of the bed to make my way towards him, obviously forgetting the shards of glass that welcomed the bottom of my bare feet.

  As I fell to the floor screaming, he rushed at me. Call it the excruciating pain of the glass in my foot or my body fooling myself into believing I had those pills in my system, I started vomiting all over the floor.

  Shivering and shaking, I looked up to find the shadow man but he had disappeared.

  “Help me,” I exhaled painfully as I started dry heaving. My body was revolting and I was unable to control anything it was doing.

  With the last violent jolt of my stomach, my eyes slammed shut and my body landed face first on the disgusting excuse of a carpet below me. I never felt the blow, however, I found myself drifting ever so slightly above a bed of lilac colored posies, strewn across an island large enough to hold a quarter of a football field. There was one ridiculously large, decaying tree in the corner by the water, leaning to expose every single root but the one that held onto the leaching sand.

  The clouds above swirled playfully, as the birds swooped in wave-like patterns to the beat of the violent waves crashing against the fingernail sized beach.

  I was jolted to my feet by a tug at my hand, as I was engulfed by the arms of someone I now recognized as the man in the shadows of my room. As I pushed him off me, I looked up to a face that I couldn’t see. It was so blurred, his features melted together making it impossible for me to discern anything. His voice, warbled by the vibrations of my subconscious, made it impossible for me to recogniz
e it but I knew who he was. I knew in my heart that he was familiar to me but trying to say his name through the cursed tying of my tongue, made the dream seem more like a nightmare.

  “Come back to me,” he said, quite clearly this time, “you have to come back to me.”

  “I can’t,” I said as if I knew I could honestly try. “I can’t even say your name!” He pulled me close with so much passionate vigor that I felt as if I had been pulled inside him. His arms, so strong and safe, held me as tightly as one man could without strangling the breath from my soul.

  Realizing the aggressive nature of his greeting, he loosened his grip as he leaned in to whisper in my ear. “You have to come find me Eva. We can’t live like this anymore. Please come find me!”

  I tried to respond, but as it goes in any dream – that moment you want to speak with determined honesty, you mysteriously lose your voice.

  The next thing I knew, he was pushing me towards the water with equal vitality. “Wake up Eva, wake up and find me!” With one final push, I flew back and into the frigid ocean water. Inhaling the salt water as I tried to call out, forced me to wake up and once again vomit, all over the apartment floor I had been laying on the entire time.

  As I attempted to pick myself up and out of the filth, I could feel something was missing--a part of me, or of my soul and I felt as if I had just suffered a great loss. A greater loss than the one that would have driven me to attempt suicide.

  I had no idea why this dream would have caused me so much pain. Thing is, the moment I woke up, I couldn’t remember any of it, but the hole it left in me was more excruciating than I could bear.

  Still ignoring the blood dripping from my sliced foot, I looked down at my knees to find a crumpled piece of paper. On it read a very plainly stated reason for wanting to end my life, but even in all its despair, it didn’t match the feelings of sorrow I had now. It spoke of a feeling of loneliness, of being such an underdog in the fight for life and being the punching bag of my own spastic nature. It spoke of a loss in identity and sanity in the life I was living; something my surroundings obviously solidified.

  The rest of the note had been washed away by the rain that now dripped steadily from the ceiling above me, leaving one legible, sad line and a name on the bottom of the paper. A name that was very different than the name the faceless man in the dream had called me.

  ‘With all the regret a woman like me could have in this world…

  -Melody I pulled the glass out of my foot and made my way to the shower that doubled as my kitchen sink. Standing under the unbalanced stream of ice cold water, I did what I could to wash away the last hour of my life.

  It wasn’t the vomit or dirt that bothered me, but rather the idea that this was what I called my life. Maybe if I stood there long enough, I could cleanse myself of the misery I felt and feel good enough to do something else about it.

  When I was done, I searched the gloomy and run-down apartment for something to change in to. As I did, I tried to learn everything I could about myself. Who was I? Who was Melody?

  After thumbing through the pages of the diary I found under the mattress, I was able to determine that, Melody was a woman who seemed to have spent so much time trying to fit in. So much so that she stayed with her alcoholic boyfriend Leland, who stayed too drunk to notice that she didn’t even like him.

  A square peg in a round hole, she tried so hard to be the cool girlfriend, excusing Leland’s behavior and even enabling it. She even found herself medicating with random drugs and prescription pills, in an attempt to not care about the bottom of the barrel she lived in.

  The more I poked around, the more I could remember this life, but it honestly felt foreign to me. This life, Melody’s life, didn’t feel like a life I would have allowed myself to be in. It felt wrong and disconnected and I was sure something had gone very, very wrong for me to end up like this.

  I sat down on the side of the bed to slip shoes on my tender feet, when I noticed a wallet sitting half open on the bedside table. The name on the license said Melody O’Harrigan. I looked at the mirror next to me and back to the license I now had in my hands. Sure enough, next to the name was a picture that matched the face I saw in the mirror. I really was Melody and according to the birthdate, it was my twenty-sixth birthday.

  I was a pretty girl, with strong features and high cheekbones. By mainstream standards I would have been a decent palate to work with, but it seemed my nature allowed for the word ‘quirky’ to best describe me. I was well over five feet tall, but felt so much smaller than I should have.

  Don’t ask me why, but it was said once to me by one of Leland’s asshole friends and it just stuck. I had long stringy hair that I didn’t do much with and my wardrobe lacked any imagination at all. My homeless chic look allowed for Jack, the homeless Veteran that lived at the bottom of our basement stairs, to compare me to a trash heap.

  We were way below middle class, but Leland’s workmans comp check enabled us to live slightly above poverty level. The alley cats behind our rundown apartment building lived better than we did…they at least found something to eat every day. However, he never went without anything to drink or enough drugs to stick in his veins or up his nose.

  After reading about all the misery and pain, I decided this was not a life I was going to continue living. I was disgusted by the thought of staying where I was or even knowing that I would have chosen death over change. I was determined that I was going to walk away from it all and start over. I could feel the disconnect that came with an urge to better my life and I knew this was the perfect time to do it. I was on my way out anyway and this time I felt I could do it right!

  So I grabbed my moth-eaten, multi colored wool jacket and handmade scarf and hobbled my way towards the door. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far when a very drunk Leland and a couple of his friends stumbled in. With the dim lighting and intoxication that proceeded limits he had reached before, he tripped over the threshold running into me. With the weight of his body, I fell with him, ending up underneath the stench of stale cigarettes, fermented body odor and days old liquor.

  Thanks to the jolt of impact, he began vomiting as his head wobbled just above the floor, inches from my left ear. I remember thinking how grateful I was that he was considerate enough to keep it from getting on me.

  “Get off me,” he mumbled, trying to push himself up. “What the hell are you doing, Get the…get off me.”

  As he pushed himself into a starting push up position, he stopped to stare directly in my face.

  I could see his pupils try to dilate as he attempted to focus enough to see me.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I pushed on his chest forcing him to sit up, hoping to get the smell of liquor and vomit out of my face.

  I should have been shocked that he would ask me such a question but with the way I felt, I was hoping he had an answer that followed his question. But then again, I was only assuming that he was Leland. I honestly couldn’t remember what his face looked like and his questioning who I was caused me to doubt what I thought to be true.

  “Damn, Lee,” his friend said, helping him to sit up. “You must be drunker than I thought.”

  Leland brushed himself off as he reached for the beer that had miraculously fallen without breaking.

  “Seriously,” he said, looking back at me. “I don’t know who the fuck you are.”

  “It’s Melody, you dumb fuck!” his friend responded now helping him to his feet.

  I was now up off the floor and trying to make my way towards the door. I really didn’t care if he thought I was Melody or not. I was leaving anyway.

  But as drunk as he was, his reflexes were faster than expected.

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me close enough that he could see. I stood silent as his glassy eyes searched my face for something that he recognized. As he kept searching, I noticed that under that rough, used up crusty exterior, there was what was once an extremely attractive man. He looked as if
a frat boy turned rocker had let himself go. I could see why someone would have been attracted to him at one point. There was beauty lost in there somewhere.

  “Nope!” he said pushing me away. “You ain’t Melody. I know Melody and you ain’t her.

  He leaned in a little bit closer and growled with a slight chuckle. “Melody is a big fat loser. You can smell the desperation on her.”

  I backed away feeling behind me for the door.

  “You,” he continued in a liquor induced southern accent. “You are somethin’ different.”

  His friends just stood there with stupid grins on their faces, watching the whole thing as if it were entertainment.

  “Aaaand,” Leland barked as he tried to make his way closer. “Since you ain’t her, you can stick around and party with us if you want to.” I grabbed the satchel hanging on the hook by the door and crossed the threshold looking back one last time.

  “I think it’s best if I move on,” I said, still completely lost by it all. “You are right. I’m not Melody and I don’t belong here.”

  I hobbled my way towards the end of the hall when he came stumbling out after me. “Fine then. Good luck with that. You’ve got no one Melody. Remember that. I’m the only one that ever took care of you! I am the only one who ever loved you and now you ain’t got nobody.”

  I stopped in front of the broken elevator and turned to see him desperately trying to find a wall to hold him up.

  “I thought you said I wasn’t Melody.” I said, with a slight attitude.

  “I never said that,” he answered breathlessly as he slid against the wall and to the ground.

  “I’m drunk Mel, don’t listen to anything I say.”

  I reached out for the sign on the broken elevator door and then looked at the ten flights of stairs to my left.

  “I think you were right the first time when you said I wasn’t,” I said, looking back at him. “I really, really don’t think I am.” I tried for a second to remember my life with Leland, or even a life before him, and I kept coming up with empty visions; visions with no real emotion or self-awareness attached to them.