Wordsmiths Fiction Week 2: Season 24 – The Envelope

kouba01 (82)in #fiction-s24wk2 • 2 months ago

Hello everyone!

Today, I'm participating in @waqarahmadshah's Steemit challenge, I am trying to let my imagination soar high. To participate: Enter here: Wordsmiths Fiction Week 2: The Envelope | Steemit Challenge Season 24.

Since he began his night shifts at the Interstate 54 gas station, Diego had become accustomed to the reassuring monotony of frozen hours, punctuated by the purr of soda refrigerators, the mechanical murmurs of gas pumps, and the rare human silhouettes slipping between the shelves under a pale light, but this routine, as bland as it was comforting, had been abruptly interrupted the night when the driver of the old blue sedan had presented himself for the first time, motionless, silent, looking through the window as one scrutinizes a memory that one no longer knows where to place.

Source

And it was only when he discovered that white envelope, carefully placed behind the ice maker like a forgotten message from destiny, that Diego felt for the first time that the boundary between his memory and his reality was beginning to crack. Inside the envelope, folded with almost ceremonial precision, was a handwritten letter on age-yellowed paper, written in elegant but nervous calligraphy, as if each word had been engraved in the urgency of a final confession:

“Diego, if you are reading this, it means the cycle has started again. You don't know me yet, but you once knew me. Look in your car trunk. It's time to return to where it all began. Don’t be late.” 2:17 »*

Caught between the absurd irony of the situatio, a treasure hunt apparently orchestrated by a nocturnal strange, and a growing sense of familiar strangeness, Diego almost mechanically obeyed the instruction, opened the trunk of his old Mazda, and found a rusty metal box containing a broken watch stopped precisely at 2:17, an old black and white photo of an abandoned hospital, and a badge bearing his name... but the face on the ID photo wasn't his, or at least not the one he still thought he had.

As the nights passed, always marked by the return of the sedan and the occasional appearance of unusual objects, a key without a lock, a lock of hair tied with a red ribbon, an audio recording where a child's voice called his name in a pleading tone, Diego felt something deeper than a simple doubt crack within him: a fault opened in the very fabric of his memory, revealing not a forgotten past, but an erased past.

Until that fateful night when, giving in to an irrepressible intuition, he took the route indicated on an old scribbled map found in one of the desk drawers, a route that did not exist on any GPS, but that his hands knew like one knows the outlines of a dream repeated a thousand times. What he found at the end of the path wasn't a place, but, for a moment, a suspended, half-collapsed former psychiatric clinic, hidden in the heart of a thick wood where the trees seemed to lean in to listen. As he crossed the threshold, the light from his lamp flickered, and a visceral cold seized him, as if the walls were exhaling the memories of the screams they had contained.

There, at the end of the corridor, in a room with walls covered with children's drawings scribbled on the plaster, Diego saw a figure sitting in the shadows, a silhouette with slow gestures, with a face covered by a cracked white mask... and when she turned her head, he saw himself, younger, thinner, his eyes drained of emotion.

"You shouldn't have come back," the voice said with terrifying calm. "We were at peace."

And suddenly everything became clear: Diego was not a simple gas station employee, but the last lucid fragment of a multiple personality buried deep within a patient forgotten for two decades in this disused institution , the "real" Diego was only a mental construction, a role played again and again, every night at 2:17, by a consciousness trapped in a time loop of dissociation.

Source

The gas station, the customers, the sedan, the envelope, everything was only an internal staging, an attempt by his mind to recompose a stable reality, to give meaning to a life that had never really left the walls of this padded room.

And as the watch stopped in the box began to tick again, at exactly 2:17, the loop began again.

Total words: 701, counted using https://wordcount.com/

Conclusion&Perspectives

This participation, by playing on the ambiguity of reality and the fragility of memory, deeply questions our relationship to identity, subtly underlining how the human mind can construct and deconstruct reality to preserve its internal coherence, by exploring the blurred limits between perception and truth, it reminds us that each individual carries within them multiple worlds, made of real or imagined memories, participating in this competition allowed me to understand that fictional writing is not only a creative act, but also a revealing mirror our own existential questions about what it really means to exist.

Thank you very much for reading, it's time to invite my friends @impersonal, @max-pro, @pathanapsana to participate in this contest.

Best Regards,
@kouba01