I Used to Love to Travel

This is a fiction piece I wrote for my writing group.  I try to write every day.  500 words at least.  I hope that this will help in preparation for NaNoWriMo - either with ideas or being in the habit of writing at least 500 words a day.
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Whenever I’m feeling particularly nostalgic for the old days, I dig through my memory box and pull out my old passport.  Ahh, the places I used to visit.

The stamp in my passport for England, and then again for France when we got off the ferry at Calais.  The stamp for Belgium and Germany.  The stamp for Australia when I thought living down under would be fun (it’s not.  It’s hot in December and the flora and fauna are out to kill you!)  The stamp for Japan, when I travelled there with the volleyball team. 

The multiple stamps from the United States when I would travel to visit family across the country.  And the stamps to Africa, Europe, China, Russia, the Caribbean.   I was very well travelled.  Now?  There are no more public airports.  No more commercial planes.  No more travel.

Because five years ago,  came The War. 

I don’t even know if the countries I loved to visit exist anymore.  Travel is completely banned.  Crossing borders is impossible.  Unless you are in the army.  Or you can find a way to cross the border.  But it’s illegal and people who are caught trying to cross the border are killed on sight.  No trial, no excuses. 

The group in power now, I don’t even know what to call them.  What country they originate from seems to change daily.  All I can tell you is that there is no more government as we knew it.  No more elections.  We’re essentially overseen by a military faction.  Rumour has it that it’s the same in the United States.  Whatever is left of it.  Rumour is all we have.  There’s no more news that isn’t heavily biased towards the Faction.  Whatever news we hear, it’s dictated by the Faction.  Which is what we call the government.  There’s really no other name.  We don’t even know what country they originated from.  It wasn’t even a military coup of the government.  You can’t overthrow a government when the government no longer exists. 

It started out with rumours of war.  Factions in the Middle East banded together and started invading countries surrounding the Middle East.  Then, other countries started taking sides – both the invaded and the invaders.  Some sided with the invaders before they could invade their country.  Europe fell first.  Then Africa.  China joined on and North Korea blew them off the map.  Pretty soon, most of the nuclear weapons were either launched or destroyed.  Governments toppled before countries were invaded.  Citizens were clamouring to their governments for help.  To ensure their countries weren’t invaded.  Then North Korea and Iran attacked the United States with nuclear weapons.   Before we knew it, there was no more United States.  There was no more Canada.  At least, not in the way they had been before.  Some parts of what used to be the United States became part of Canada’s land, but when the walls went up, it didn’t matter.  Families were torn apart.  And communication on the other side of the wall was non-existent.  I haven’t heard a word from anyone in my family on the other side of that wall in three years.  I don’t even know if they’re alive or dead.

The war lasted four years.  In some ways, it’s still being fought.  The American army, once considered so strong, was quickly decimated when Iran and North Korea bombed the US.  First they took out whatever weapons installations they could.  That included nuking the Arctic.  Colorado is a huge burning hole in the ground.  NORAD doesn’t exist except as a memory.

The British and Canadian armies fell immediately after.  As did pretty much the entire European armies.  Germany, quite unsurprisingly, took side with the Faction.  China and South Korea are also pretty much nothing more than large craters.  And with the size of Asia – that’s saying something. 

Most of what we know about the outside world is what little we hear from the Faction news and rumours that people say they hear from the other side of the wall.  Someone is always saying they know someone who snuck over the border and came back with news.

I don’t believe it.   My cousin tried to sneak across the border to get news of our family.  That was three years ago.  He never came back. 

I Am A Warrior

I Am A Warrior

Every day, I get out of bed.  No small feat, truly.  While physically there is nothing wrong with me in terms of getting out of bed, emotionally, some days are harder to get started than others. 

There are days when I almost bound out of bed, ready to take on the day, excited for whatever tasks I have ahead of me at work, and looking forward to the evening when I get to spend time with my husband and my children.

Other days, I don’t want to get out of bed and face the tasks I have ahead of me at work.  I just want to stay curled up in bed and sleep.  Not because the tasks themselves are insurmountable, but because the black cloud that is always somewhere in the periphery, has found its way in front of me. 

No one knows the battles people face and fight day after day after day.  They see someone and make snap judgements based on what they see (I discuss this more in depth in my piece about What We See).  But really, you have no idea what any one person is facing at any point in their day.

Recently there was a video circulating on Facebook that has gone viral.  It started as a photo of three young men leaning out of the window of a drive-through coffee shop and holding the hand of the person in the car.  The story came out almost immediately.  She is, evidently, a regular at that shop, and the boys – all of them teens – recognized her and recognized that she seemed distraught. 

She was. She had just lost her husband and was feeling overwhelmed.  She had tears on her cheeks when she pulled up to the window.  This was during the busy morning rush, and the boys were eager to get through the drive-through line as quickly as possible.  Until this woman pulled up to the window.

What did these boys do?  These boys stopped everything they were doing and prayed with the woman to help her find strength to navigate her new life without her husband.  They held up the line of customers to offer love, support and prayer to a woman they really only knew by her coffee order.  They also gave her her coffee for free, as an act of goodwill and because everyone needs a treat now and then.

My office is attached to a shopping mall.  As part of my lunch and for exercise, I always go for a walk that takes me around the mall a couple of times.  I see a lot of people during my walk, and I have learned from watching the people as I walk, not to judge.  The woman pushing the dog in the stroller?  Don’t judge (and man, did I use to judge people like that).  Maybe she lost a child once, and this is how she copes.  Maybe the dog is handicapped and can’t walk much, but she enjoys being out.

The older child in a stroller?  Maybe that child isn’t able to walk for long for whatever reason. 

I see business people walking to and fro.  I see people meandering – some older, some new moms pushing strollers.

We all have our own stories and our own battles to fight.  Some of us are battling inner demons.  Some of us are battling addiction.  Some of us are battling our own feelings of self-loathing.  Some of us are just hoping they can keep it together until the end of the day.

I battle depression.  More often than not, I win the battle.  And when I’m losing the battle, you likely wouldn’t know it just by looking at me.  Because I’m up.  And I’m at work.  And I am a warrior.

Living vs. Existing.

He sat alone in the cold room.  The only noises were the hum of the air conditioning unit, the vending machines in the corner and the constant tick-tick-tick of the clock above the doorway.  But he wasn’t aware of any of the noises.  Nothing seemed to distract him. 

In his hands he held a small, blue blanket.  He kept turning the blanket – what remained of the blanket in any case – around in his hands.  It was no longer a full blanket – hadn’t been for years.  It was just slightly larger than a handkerchief now.  Still soft.  He brought it to his nose and inhaled.  It still smelled of her.  Mint and… paper.  Like books.  Something she always had in her purse – a packet of mints or mint gum (which invariably opened and scattered all over the bottom of her purse) and a book.  She read constantly. 

The blue blanket had been their son’s.  It had wrapped him on the day they brought him home from the hospital, covered him as he transitioned into his ‘big boy bed’, and had followed him throughout his childhood.  As a young boy, he had stuffed the blanket at the bottom of sleeping bags when he went to friends to sleep over.  As a teen, he’d hung it over his window.  Before he left for university, his mom had cut this small square off the main blanket, before packing it into one of his boxes.  Even at 18, he was bringing his favourite blanket along.

One of his friends, who had studied in the fashion department, had taken a small cutting of the blanket and woven into a tie, which he had worn on his graduation.  This blanket had been with him his entire life. 

And now, this small piece, the only piece that was left, would likely follow him to his death. 

His son, his bright, energetic and entertaining son lay just doors away.  Machines were breathing for him.  Machines were pumping oxygen through his body while keeping his heart beating and his blood flowing.  His hands were still warm.  His eyes seemed to move beneath their closed lids.  But without the machines, his body would do nothing on its own.

The doctors had said he could exist like this for years.  That the machines would keep his body alive.  But he had to decide if that’s what he wanted to do.  And he had to make this decision alone.  He’d already said goodbye to his wife, the mother of the boy in the room down the hall.  He didn’t know if he could say goodbye to his son, too.  Not within a day of saying goodbye to his wife.   What would his life mean, if he didn’t have his family in it any longer?  Could he face the empty years?  Could he face going back to the house, knowing his wife and his son would never again walk through the front door? 

His son had been an adventurer.  In high school, he’d joined an orienteering club and gone on a week-long camping trip with his friends, using only maps and compasses.  No GPS.  In university, he had studied environment.  He wanted to make a difference.  He studied forestation and deforestation.  He studied environmental impacts.  He was an environmental scientist.  Or, that’s what his degree said.  He would never become that environmental scientist.  The drunk driver that hit his wife’s car while she drove him home after his graduation, took care of that.  The head injuries he’d sustained, the doctor’s said, would likely leave him unable to speak, see, swallow on his own, to breathe on his own.  Basically, that driver took a strong, smart and lively boy, who looked for adventure, who lived every day to its fullest, and always thought so much of the people around him – and left him a shell.  A body, that needs machines to breathe for it, machines to pump his blood.

He made the decision.  He could not allow his son to exist.  Not when it meant he couldn’t live.  His son would not want to lie in a bed, being kept in existence, if he couldn’t participate in life.

He got up, steeled himself, and went to his son’s bedside to say his final goodbye.  He would tell the nurses his decision, and he would sit with his son, until his son no longer existed.