Loss (part 3)

The next morning Joshua woke up in the graveyard. The sun was shining down into his face, birds were singing, the sound of a lawnmower from across the cemetery whirred. And all of this only served to increase the already-gigantic headache building up behind his eyes. Time to go home. Not looking at Nicole's grave, he stumbled off, leaving the mostly empty bottle where it lay.

It was a long time before Joshua went back to the cemetery. He wasn't sure whether to believe that the bizarre transformation that he had experienced there was real, or if he'd just dreamed it in the moments before the sun's rays woke him up. His sense of the passage of time was completely in the toilet. He hadn't worked in a long time, hadn't gone out with friends much. He mostly stayed at home and worked at actively forgetting about his problems with the help of his new liquid "friends." But it was difficult. He was still living in the same house they'd owned together. Reminders of her were everywhere. He tried to forget as much as possible, but he couldn't suppress it. Always his memories bubbled below the surface. His mind twisted itself up like a wet towel being wrung out, never dealing with his grief head-on; in fact, he never dealt with it at all. He only tried to forget it, push it back, ignore it. He didn't visit Nicole's gravesite for a long time.

But... finally he had to find out if that night's experience had been real. It had seemed so vivid, it couldn't possibly have been a dream. Quite some time had passed since the funeral, and he was able to steel himself before going to the grave so that he didn't collapse in grief when he saw the tombstone. But when he got there, his eyes grew damp. He blinked the tears away angrily - /I should be over this, it's been over a year, I'm ok, I'm ok/ - all the while knowing it was a complete lie but not willing to admit it to himself. Somehow he managed to steel himself - /think about the task at hand/ - and said the "code word."

The wind, the awful noise, everything came back just as he had remembered it. Again he was knocked onto his backside, but the fantastic city was real! It was amazing. A childhood filled with fantasy stories had primed him for the existence of such a place; in fact, he'd always suspected that other worlds existed and felt like he'd just find them, sooner or later. And now he had.

/Time to explore this place,/ he thought. So much to explore. So many opportunities here.

So many distractions. Here he wouldn't have to constantly think about Nicole. Not that he even considered the idea that this was why he went back. /So many opportunities./