She picked up a resignation form today. She had been thinking about it for a while, handing in her notice, taking her last year. Every day is just the same, different faces, different flavours, but underneath, it was all the same. Was there any point in the endless forward march, the slow decline into ill health, unemployment and poverty? She didn’t have children, no friends who came to visit, and it was at least three years since her last match.
She sat on the corner of her single bed, in her single room, the thin long window illuminating the bare floor. She pushed a loose strand of mousy blonde hair behind her ear, and picking at her thumb, she wandered in thought.
She could travel, she could see the ocean, she could stand beneath trees, she could sit in silence. For one year. It was as good as it got, some people only got 6 months. But was she ready?
She couldn’t keep going, not like this. She had seen the lifers, the people who worked for 65 years and collapsed, decrepit, into the hands of hapless, half-hearted “help”. She had even been that half-hearted, hapless help, she had worked for minimum wage, clearing up bodily fluids, spoon feeding, doing what she could, but it destroyed you, seeing all your future had to offer.
A lot of people who worked there handed in their notice; you had to do it between 40 and 55 to get the year. Some people applied for special circumstances after 55, but generally they got less time.
She was 47. A lot could change in her life still. She could meet someone, she could have children, grandchildren, she could grow old. Couldn’t she…? Did she want to? She turned it over in her mind. She had accepted a lot in her life, but she just couldn’t face the rest of her life, playing out, day by slow dragging, hardworking, lonely, day. Night after empty, starless night. If she took her year, she could get away from the cities and their thick rank pollution. She could escape the crush of the masses, the regimented flow of preoccupied people. Her parents took her to a forest once, before the regulations changed, and closing her eyes, she could almost hear the hushed whisper of branches, almost feel the dappled sunlight on her upturned face. Almost. She opened her eyes, was there ever really any question? She had dreamed of it for as long as she could remember, and in that moment, she realised, she was always going to quit, it was never a question of did she want to, just when. Was she ready?
She flopped back onto her bed, bouncing back against the overly springy mattress. Relief coursed through her. She was going to quit, maybe not today, but she would do it. The digital display in the wall flashed, green numbers ticking over, 23:00. Instinctively, she felt around her bedside tablet, and pressing the button, retrieved her small blue pill. Blue before bed, white before work. It dissolved on her tongue, and she felt the thoughtless relaxation wash over her.
The next morning, she woke before her alarm had chance to rouse her. She stood at the window, watching the constant ebb and flow of people and traffic, the living city beneath her never slept. Her resolve had only hardened overnight, it felt right. She retrieved the form. She would quit. She would take the year. One good year, then call it quits.
Speckles of mirrored green flew across the face of the stream like a symphony, building a crescendo of living light in the space where water and emotions inhabited her mind. Memories sluiced through her, of the time before work when her mother had brought her to places like this. Before she had been removed to school and then later college, taken into that grey place and the unending weight of the conditioning drugs.
She glanced up at the trees, swaying young leaves in spring breeze echoed bitter-sweet memories of mother's face. Calm clucking as she misbehaved and warm enfolding embrace when she scraped her knees, words like balm healing as she stroked her hair and hummed tuneless melodies.
The trees spoke her name in the building breeze, the sound of it wilted through her mind like the slow fall of autumn leaves.
"Elanor."
Fields of golden sun-blushed grass swayed into the distance where mountains feathered the horizon in morning’s mist-kissed ache of pastiche. Almost airy in their rough impression, though she could tell they were the solid granite bones of the earth. That was where she was headed, the lonely heights where the wild heather clung to mountains shoulder, obstinate like a built-born child. Another memory pasted itself across her minds-eye wiping everything away in the sweeping heavy gloss of a child's drug-hued eyes. Charlie at dinner time, in the school canteen. All the other children keeping their distance from his sad weeping eyes as the dinner staff placed minimum rations in the blood red plastic bowl. Skin flaking away from his cheeks in the path of his tears, washing down onto his dinner tray. Leaving crimson scar's trailing his eyes like comets glimmering their fiery despair. She handed him her chocolate bar and the world lit up in his smile, his joy a treasure in the cobalt grey of the canteen. She beckoned him to sit with her.
The sun of his smile shone down the paths of time, vivid shivering prescience across her synapses. She knew she would see him again in this forest. Death was like a soft reassuring companion here, the rot of fungus decaying wind-fall, food for woodlice. The cycle of leaves shed yearly to furnish the forest floor with nutrients, this cycle of sacrifice embracing death as the path to more life bled an aching song through her body and mind. If she were to speak to the ghosts of her past, it would be in this place.
She followed the stream's meandering path through the warm earth-scented shade. Spring sun broke through leaf-laden canopy, creating a carpet of dancing shadows beneath bow and bur. She pulled a loaf of honey-sweetened oatcake from her pack and snacked, swept into realms of melting bliss as her mind reeled in the flavour of un-synthesized food. Floods of summer shoals of slow sweltering days fazed in and out, mingling with the slow growth of earth through root and stem, spiced with the pollen coats of bumbling bees.
The path opened out as the stream gurgled a song of pure joy in its widening. Sun blazed and water leaped against banks of deep umber clay as the stream forged a way through the clearing. The forest meadow shone golden in the haze of pollen glaze and gauzy dandelion seed. Haloed by dancing aphid and busy bees, wildflowers winked a kaleidoscope of gaudy colour through eyelashes of golden grasses. She stopped dead, enraptured. She glanced to her left and tears flooded from her eyes as Charlie smiled up at her nodding and reached out to wipe hot tears from her cheeks. She glanced to her right and saw her mother approaching hand in hand with the father she had never known. Her mother smiled, humming tuneless melodies as she placed her father’s hand in hers and a whisper of wind traced words through her mind in leafy letters as the trees at the clearing's edge quivered.
"I'm sorry my daughter."
She wandered on, hand in hand with her ghosts wondering at how different the world was without the blue or white pills.
The end.
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