“That place is filled with a bunch of drugs and hookers; I don’t want you kidnapped or worse”
“I know mom but I won’t stay there for long, just a couple of days and then I’m off to San Diego. Besides I won’t leave the hotel for anything”
I know how scared she was; I remembered all those phone calls threatening us for ransoms, they were like sharks that smelled blood miles away. I knew that earning us some money was going to be easy but I never knew that people were going to notice it that fast.
It’s been 20 years or so since I came back and I still have no clue about what happened but I stopped caring about that years ago and I’ve never felt better in my life. I have some dreams about my other life and I can’t believe how different it all was, sometimes it felt like nightmares, but I always woke up with a knot in my throat. I felt like I was forgetting something.
I decided to keep a dream journal so I could get some more clues on what I did back then. I wish I could still remember all that stuff as lucidly as I did back when I was five but I was so obsessed on changing that timeline that I forgot how happy I was.
After two weeks with the journal the only relevant stuff I had written so far was five odd words, the rest was just descriptions of places I visited. After some searching I saw that those five words were the most helpful of all, one lead me to my old high school and the rest were the name of some coffee shop in the downtown area. I left that day to go back home.
The first thing I decided to do was going to my school hoping to see familiar faces but after hours of going up and down stairs I had to leave, I saw some people concerned about my presence and even if I didn’t see any old friend I did remember all those stairs and how ridiculously tall they are. I know I’m in the right place.
After arriving in the coffee shop I felt like I was back in my original timeline, I remembered more stuff and I began to write down everything that came to mind. Soon I had names and some addresses from my friends and some of the moments we had like when I tried to make Alex to open a can of soda I shook but he aimed it to my face so I got really sticky.
I kept writing all this stuff and then one waitress came over to me
“Welcome, may I get you anything?”
That voice gave me chills, I haven’t met her in 20 years but I instantly knew who she was and what she meant to me.
“Is something wrong?”
“N..no, I’ll have a frappe please”
I got my second chance and now I finally have time to tell her goodbye before she leave.