Back to Before

What he remembers most about those years, is the feeling of the sun always shining on his back. It seems now to have never set in front of him, it never shone in his eyes – it was always just comfortable warmth on his back, casting a long, sleek shadow before him. But those years have all but faded from his consciousness now, substituted with the daily business of living.

Coffee rings on desks replaced soaked beer mats, backpacks morphed into briefcases - and he became used to feeling permanently weary.

“Life plays you for a fool,” he’d always say to his younger colleagues, “just wait, you’ll see. She shows you what you can have, and then she pulls it away just as you think you can grab it. Just wait, you young little pricks. Just you wait.” He’d sit there in his crumpled shirt and dark tie, and when he’d lift the coffee cup to his lips, everyone around him would instantly know that he’d drifted off into his memories again. They wouldn’t try to talk to him after that.

The mornings went by, one after the other, in a weird kind of slow hurry. He tried to hold on them, he tried to enjoy the flowers and the bees and the smell of fresh bread and good red wine, but all his fingers would wrap around were the what-ifs and regrets. So he gave up, deciding to just hold on the slippery memories. And so he forgot the regrets. One night, when he’d completely stopped hating his fate, and he went to bed with a completely open mind, the Cosmos decided to play a little trick on him:

He woke up with his head on his rucksack in a dilapidated shack in Brazil. He was 20 years old, and could not remember anything about the life before. He extracted his lean, muscular body from the sleeping bag, packed his things, and continued on up the mountain trail.

There was a comfortable warmth on his back, and the sun cast a long, sleek shadow before him.