This choice: Tell the man to take his hand off you • Go Back...
Chapter #2
"Rememember Me?"
by: lavendula13
turn, intending to tell the old man to take his hand off you. As you are about to say the words, you notice that his face is changing. Instead of an old man's face, it is, almost, the face of the first man you ever loved.
"Remember me?" He croons, in a voice that still gives you shivers after all these years. "Remember that first kiss? Or the ring I gave you? That ring is still here, in this store. If you want to go back, buy the ring."
"Back?" You echo.
"Back to the time when love was simple, and the whole world was yours to discover. Back before you discovered disillusionment and betrayal."
You look at him more closely, and that is when you realize everything in the store is oddly dim, as though seen through old glass. There are shadows where shadows shouldn't be, and an overwhelming sense of time moving away, like a train that has been missed and will never return on the same track.
"That ring is here?" You repeat, disconcerted. The idea is astonishing. You threw that ring out the window of a moving car the day you left Detroit. Who found it, and why did they bring it here, to this store, a thousand miles from Motor City? What kind of synchronicity is operating in this strange, dim little store?
"Buy the ring." He says again. "If you want to know what might have been, buy the ring."
The question becomes: do you really want to know what might have been? Isn't that why you left in the first place? Because you couldn't endure the idea of settling down with a man who was content to work on a factory line all day and watch TV in the evening. You didn't want to become Mrs. Middle American Housewife, with 1.5 children and a new Maytag every fifth year.
Or is that what you thought then? Have your goals changed in the years between that first kiss and the last, disappointing job?
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