My eyes are burning from the intoxicating glow of the computer screen. I’m typing, I believe, but I can not quite feel the sensation of the hard plastic keys as I push each of them sequentially down in order to form comprehensible words. I’m writing about the tragic death of a couple in a car wreck. A subject I know a lot about looking back on my eight unfortunate accidents. How is it that I can walk away from that many crashes without a scratch, but these poor people lose their lives in the same rotten situation? I hate thinking about those types of question this early in the morning. It’s four o’clock, and I’m damned lucky that the local paper will let me work on my report at my apartment.

My little apartment. To tell the truth, it’s the only thing I’ve got left, and I’m about ready to leave it myself. It’s positioned above an old abandoned coffee shop. The aroma of coffee beans and shots of espresso still seems to leak its way through the floor. Or maybe I just haven’t been able to rid myself of that unforgettable scent since I quit working there almost twenty years ago. I have a problem with letting go of memories like that. They’re like annoying tenants in my brain that play the television loud enough that I think my eardrum is going to burst. Normally, you would complain to the super, but when you technically are the super of that residence, you’re plain stuck unless you want to sound like a psycho-case who hasn’t taken his pills today.

At about a quarter to five, I finish the article and sign it with my ever so recognizable name, T.L. Storing. The real first name is Thurman, but what a train when you are writing a simple story for a simple newspaper. My mother always told me that it was a strong name. I always take the time to pause and laugh at this irony. A strong name for one who stays up late at night typing on a computer and thinking about the past. My sister always told me that I dwelled too much in the past. Hell, maybe she’s right. That’s why I have to get out of this place. This existence.

After listening to the computer’s soft, sad electronic buzz as I shut it down, I lay down on my soft bed. Only thing is, sleep has never come so easy to me, but memories are always willing to pick up its slack. I start to think about her, which is never good. Carrie, the one that I loved. Everything around me is illuminated from the glow of street lamps and other assorted electrical disturbances. The light is beautiful until a dark figure looms in front of the window above where I lay. I must be dreaming because it’s the figure of a dark angel. The dark angel that I sent back to heaven with a bullet in her heart. Her shadow seems to transcend that glass and reach its hand out to touch my face. Its reaching for the scar across my forehead. The single slash I received the night that she died. I wish the angel would take it away, but…

My alarm sounds. It’s ringing is annoying and unrelenting. I was dreaming. Of course. I don’t know why I would think any different. I guess just hope or something. Hope that I’m not a completely lost and alone. All it does is cement the belief that I’m completely out of my skull.

I look over at the clock to shut it off. It says that it’s two in the afternoon. Damn, I’m late to turn in my article. Not that it really matters because I’m quitting anyways, but still, it was my responsibility, and I blew it like I do everything that gets handed to me. I’ll send it to them in the mail. They’ll get it as I’m on that road. The Road to the West.

I get up, get dressed, and get ready to make my big exit. I’m leaving everything. Materials don’t matter to me. As long as I have my sanity and sense of self, which both have a check right by them for now. I’ll leave a note for Bill. We’ve been friends forever, so I think he should probably get whatever the hell I have left. That’s the best I can do to make up for all the trouble I’ve dumped on his head these past years.

I’m about to leave the door with a backpack slung over my shoulder and the car key in my grip whenever a figure steps into the empty doorway. I know that figure better than I know all of the lines to my favorite movie, Blade Runner. She stands the same height as me with arms akimbo as though she has to protect herself from my obvious reluctance to talk to her.

“So, you really are taking off?” she asks.

“How did you find out?” I question her without answering the obvious previous question.

“You underestimate the range of my hearing,” she states. “I do have some connections, you know.”

I could hear the gears shifting in my head trying to think of who could have told her about my departure. No names come up out of my mental Rolodex. It must be broken.

“Well, it’s defiantly not Mom and Dad,” I say, thinking out loud. “They don’t know about this.”

“Yet,” she finishes my last sentence for me.

“Julie, just tell me who the hell it was!” I yell, growing impatient with her annoying game.

“See,” she says, pointing at me. “That’s the Thurman that I remember. Always on the edge for no reason.”

“I have my reasons,” I say through gritted teeth.

Just like I have my reasons for not talking to my only sister for fifteen years. I couldn’t stand being judged and criticized all the time because I have yet to atone for past sins. I won’t apologize for not being like her and being able to brush off all feelings and emotional connections like she does.

Julie’s a doctor now. You could say that she’s the successful one of the Storing siblings, and I would have to agree. She didn’t get into the medical field, however, on the thought of helping save people’s lives and rebuilding their lost hope. No, she got in more for personal fulfillment. Boredom is her enemy, so she always looks for a way to entertain herself even if its through the activity of heart transplants and tracheotomies. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with this philosophy, I have to admit that she’s one hell of an M.D.

“So, why are you leaving?” she asks after stepping inside of the small apartment.

“Just have to get away from this, I suppose,” I say.

“That was the reason last time, wasn’t it? You are getting repetitive,” she criticizes.

I know the main reason she says that is to refer to the many times I have packed up and moved. Too many to account for. Even for a person that lives in the past it’s too damn many.

“What are you doing here?” I ask her to get straight to the point.

“No reason, I guess,” she says, which doesn’t really answer the question.

Julie rarely does anything without a reason. There had to be a reason she was here right now, but what was it?

“I suppose you heard that Josh is back in town,” I state.

“Why should I care?” she says more than asks.

“I just thought that you would come back here to see him,” I say quietly because I know that I was wrong to say it.

“See,” Julie starts off. “You thought, but you didn’t think like me. Hell, I wouldn’t want you to think like me.”

I remember when we used to be closer before she got all honked off at my detachment from the rest of the world. We used to just sit and drink bottled Coke. The bottled kind, not the canned excuse. We would just sit and talk about various topics that wouldn’t matter to the ordinary person. They mattered to me, but I’m still not sure how Julie viewed them. One time, she told me that she would never get married, which has still proven true. It wasn’t this fact that surprised me very much but the reason for her revelation made me see things in a different light. She told me that she thought that she was meant to marry Clive Owen, the coolest guy to every grace a movie theatre screen in her opinion, but she happened to be born at the wrong place and time. I know that she was just joking about marrying the Oscar nominee, but I have to agree that she was right about the second statement. Perhaps we both were born at the wrong place and time. We both belonged in either a decade that had passed long ago or one that hasn’t even been invented yet. Either way, we both fit in like Jesus Christ on a nametag at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting .

“Anyways,” she says, walking back towards the door. “I have to get going.”

“Why did you come here?” I ask as she steps through the open door back out into the light.

“Do you really want to leave this place?” she asks, as though she doesn’t know the answer.

“Yes,” I reply as I feel a tug in my heart.

“Then, you don’t want to know,” Julie says. “It will only make you stay.”

“Nothing can make me stay,” I protest, ignoring the sick feeling that begins to churn in my stomach.

“I know you better than anyone else does. I know that you always have to try and play the Galahad part of the tale. Galahad, mind you, not Lancelot. Sure, Lancelot saved people, but he did it mainly for himself and the ladies. Galahad, on the other hand, well, I have no idea what his reasoning was,” she states like a scholar in the Arthurian legend.

“Just tell me,” I say, glossing over her entire dramatic speech.

“The other day they dragged Bill into the hospital. He was all shot up, and his insides looked like Chef Boyardee’s spaghetti and meatballs. We managed to sustain his life, and he‘s on his way to a good recovery,” my sister says, looking up into the sun the entire time.

“Bill’s a lot stronger than you think. He’ll be alright,” I say while trying to think of who would want riddle my friend with bullets.

“So, you’re still leaving?” she asks after my last passive statement.

“He can take care of himself. You’re the only thing blocking the doorway and keeping me from the road to the west,” I say confidently.

“Alright, Hiroshima, then let me drop the A-Bomb on you right now,” she says as pulls a medical file out of the jean jacket she’s wearing for the only purpose of concealment.

She quietly leaves as I look at the small scrawl of a pen on the front of the manila folder. I can barely make out what it says but that’s mainly because I don’t want to comprehend it’s meaning. I read it again with tears began to form in my green eyes. The date comes in clear first. It’s from only a week ago. A week of nothing but gray clouds and cold rain. The name begins to come clear after a while, and my wheezing and aching breath catches in my throat.

Written on the sheet was her name. The name of the woman that I loved and killed at the same time.

Carrie…