IR Short Stories

  The air feels different here. To me at least. I feel giddy and hopeful but scared too. I’m in a car, face out the window, driving by the sea. We don’t have this at home. The road bends to the right, leaving the sea behind, but the vista remains something out of a landscape magazine, the kind of beauty that makes one think about God and how sovereign He must be. It’s dreamy, until my driver makes a sharp right turn and enters the forest through a bumpy dirt road. I sit back and look ahead. The green slowly disappears, and all that is left ahead is a parched forest. It reminds me why I am here. The sinking hole deep within me begins to open up again and suck my joy away. I need to calm my mind. I need to ground myself before I have another panic attack. The road remains bendy and full of potholes for over an hour. I can see through the trees, and from either side I do not see anything I expect to see. It didn't look like this in the pictures. I feel anxious. I did not travel 24...

  I am seeing double. It could be the wine or... my truth. Sometimes I get this feeling that this life is not my own. Like I am but a lost piece that’s not fitting anywhere in this world. I don’t know how I got here. All I know is a lot of things, or maybe everything, in my life does not make sense. Why is life a mystery? Give me a map. Is that too much to ask? One last gulp at the wine. I throw the bottle on a pile in a bin and burst out laughing. What I really want to do is scream. I want to scream so loud, but the last thing I want is attention. Perhaps I should scream, so my neighbour can have a good reason to gawk at me strangely. I don’t know his name, but every time I bump into him in the corridor, he looks at me like he knows my secrets, like he has heard the screams and knows why I scream. He invades my wet dreams sometimes, dreams that feel more like memories than dreams. Sometimes I see him, and he feels like someone I know from another life. Ridiculous, I know. Let’s c...