Picking Stones Chapter 1
"Lost"
Table of Contents
Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3 & 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6 & 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9; Chapter 10; Chapter 11; Chapter 12 & 13; Chapter 14, 15, & 16; Chapter 17 & 18; Chapter 19; Chapter 20; Chapter 21; Chapter 22; Chapter 23 & 24; Chapter 25 & 26; Chapter 27; Chapter 28; Chapter 29; Chapter 30; Chapter 31 (Final Chapter)
Chapter 1 - Lost
Waves crashed against the shore. My mind was floating—floating somewhere else. In the distance, I heard the salty water against the rocky coast and knew where I was. I tried to focus, but couldn’t. Instead there was blackness. One last attempt, and there it was. Gray breaking through the dark. The rumbling of thunder and the crackling of lightning. What finally materialized was a landscape of dramatic rock peaking in every which way until it disappeared and left the sea in its place.
What was that in the distance? The silhouette of a man far out ahead of me, the back of his brown jacket faced me. From my vantage point, I could tell he was breathing. Further past him was a lighthouse, its white body standing bright against the dark sea. Through the foggy windows at its top beams of light were sent out in the darkness and into oblivion. I looked around, and tried to see who the man was, but got nowhere. There was no face, no other people. Just the man alone with the lighthouse. I couldn’t believe how lonely he must have been.
I wanted to speak but the words caught in my throat. I tried to say something, to say anything to the man out in front of me. I wanted to talk to him; I wanted to help him. Instead blackness began to frame my view again, slowly squeezing the image in front of me tighter and tighter until the man and the lighthouse all but disappeared, leaving the darkness enveloping me again.
Nowhere. I was nothing, seeing my future out in front of me. An empty one; a lonely one. A future of sadness and darkness and depression. Then the light started blinking, allowing harsh bright whiteness to illuminate the darkness, blinding my eyes and burning painful dark circles into my retinas.
Finally coming out of my daydream, I looked up through my bout of existential dread and saw the fluorescent light hanging above me blinking at a pace that was threatening to send me into epileptic shock. Thankfully on the list of the various paranoias I had, epilepsy was not one of them.
Why do offices always use the most overwhelmingly bright and brutal lighting? Maybe they just wanted to torture people like me. Getting me to spend all my day in one spot as I clicked a keyboard in monotonous hell wasn’t enough. They needed to torture me through lighting, too.
Pushing the fantasy that had begun to play out completely out of my mind, I rolled my swivel chair back and stared straight into the light. The more I focused, the more I heard it. A faint buzzing that somehow managed to top the light’s blinking as the most excruciating form of my job’s current torture method of choice.
The almost inaudible buzzing soon became deafening. I needed to do something to put an end to the torture before it squeezed whatever was still left of my psyche. Anyway. I couldn’t take it anymore. Everything I stood to lose swarmed into my mind as I was seconds away from giving into the ensuing madness. What would I lose? Besides my girlfriend, Beth, there was nothing else. Maybe letting the fluorescent light kill me was actually a good idea.
Darkness fell in my cubicle. The light, apparently hearing my internal monologue, seemed to have lost the will to live. It shut off. Unfortunately, its horrible buzzing did not subside. Somehow, it had gotten even worse. Did I want to die that day? I guess I didn’t since I decided to make a move.
My company’s human resources department would have lost their shit had they seen me step one foot, then the other onto the swivel chair. Especially when the chair jerked to the right just as I lurched up onto it. Wrong move.
This would be how I’d die, I thought. Reaching up to tap the light back into place. The chair would roll a few inches. Getting thrust off, my arms flailing. I’d mirror a graceful manatee suspended through the air, just as my head crashed down onto the edge of the desk, severing my neck from its spine.
All of the coworkers I couldn’t stand would be gifted a free week vacation for witnessing such a traumatic event. Maybe in a different reality. In the one I currently occupied I tapped the light back into place, was momentarily blinded, and promptly hopped off the chair in defeat.
Later that morning, my disheveled face stared at me from the reflection in my rebooting computer. It was Friday. The weekend was shaping up to be a miserable one. My stomach was in a violent knot. How many days did I come in miserable? How many days did I come in wanting a change but never doing anything to actually get one?
It was exhausting. Especially when coworkers, who somehow seemed happy, approached me for small talk.
“Will! Happy Friday, man. Anything planned for the weekend?” The words oozed out of the mouth of Clark, the most annoying guy I worked with.
“Nope.”
“The kids and I are…”
As words came out of his mouth, I tried as hard as I could to keep my eyes open, to feign interest. It was nearly impossible. Especially when my consciousness started drifting again. How did he seem to genuinely enjoy his life? It didn’t make sense to me.
After what felt like an eternity, Clark finally moved on to his next victim. I looked once more at the clock and shuddered. Six more hours before I could clock out. At least it was Friday.
Cold air slapped me in the face when I exited the building and walked out onto Fifth Avenue. It was a crisp October evening. Almost half past five. The sun was just about ready to set. I felt a second wind entering my spirit. Not that I would need one.
Fridays usually consisted of me walking to the subway and getting home as quickly as possible. I’d complain about how much I hated my job to Beth before dinner, and then complain about it more while we ate. It was the same thing I did every night of the week, with the added benefit of not having to go through the usual realization of the horrors of waking up early to return to work taking place until Sunday.
Beth was great. Always so supportive, no matter how much I complained. After five years, I guess she was used to me. Lately, she had been bugging me about wanting to buy a place. “Even if it’s just a co-op to get us started,” she’d say. We’d been renting the same place in Forest Hills for a few years and she wanted a change. It made sense. But I didn’t want to commit to anything while my future was up in the air. Thankfully, she was probably the most understanding person I had ever met. And after the week I had, her comforting embrace would be the only thing that would keep me sane that night.
I stopped at Starbucks for a coffee and to grab a little surprise for her: a blueberry muffin. Her favorite. After I ordered I went to the bathroom to relieve myself, which may have been the true purpose for my visit there. I stole a glance at myself in the mirror before I walked out. My dirty blond stubble was growing in. I tried to flatten out some of the wrinkles on my forehead, and then wiped forehead grease through my hair. One last breath, heavier than before. The person staring at me in the mirror looked like a stranger.
Grabbing my order, I walked out into the city. It was so crowded yet empty. Strangers passing by. No one noticing each other as they hurried to wherever they had to be. The last rays of the sun were breaking through the glass buildings towering over me like spears being thrown from the heavens. I wished one of them would impale me.
My phone buzzed. It was a message from my friend Phil. Apparently I had agreed to go hiking upstate with him the next morning. There goes sleeping in, I thought.
The subway entrance was fast approaching. I took one last look at the sun before I ducked inside. I loved the fall, but like everything else in life, it had its faults. The sun would be set by the time I unearthed from the subway station in Forest Hills. It was something that always made me a little sad.
It was as if the world had fast forwarded six hours in the span of my thirty-minute train ride. The walk to my apartment was a dark and lonely one. My shoes scraped against concrete. As I sailed beneath the awnings jutting from the storefronts lining Austin Street, I couldn’t help but check behind me every few steps.
Lately, I had been extremely paranoid. Of what? Who knows. For some strange reason, whenever I walked alone I would get an intense feeling that someone was following me. I highly doubt anyone really had a bone to pick with a complacent 28-year-old, but it did nothing to shake the feeling of being followed.
The first time it happened was a few weeks ago. After leaving the grocery store, the hairs on the back of my neck began to creep up. Any morsels of oxygen in my lungs were vacuumed out. I was on the corner of Austin and Ascan with no one around. Well, no one except for a weird presence around me. It hung heavy in the air and made my chest feel like a cinder block had been set on top of it. I stood frozen for a few seconds until I clenched my butthole and made a mad dash for home. I never told Beth about it. When I got home I acted natural.
Since then, though, the feeling returned whenever I was alone. It must have been something I put in my head. Maybe it was some dumb show that played on TV after I fell asleep on my couch, seeping itself into my subconscious as I slept.
Real or not, the feeling of being followed, of being watched, still lingered. Maybe I wanted someone to follow me. Maybe I wanted to believe someone would give me the time of day. The desire for importance was hard to shake.
I came out of my head when I heard an old woman hobbling behind me with a few of grocery bags. I nearly jumped when I heard her. My eyes darted behind me and again fifteen more times, needing to make sure she wasn’t a shapeshifter or demon or anything. Alright, maybe something was wrong with me.
My apartment building came into view. I shook off the image of the demon lady that had etched into my mind and made way for the entrance. While that image was able to go away, the feeling of being followed stood strong.
I reached for my apartment door as the hallway light flickered. For a split-second I was transported back into my cubicle, under the light from this morning. I materialized back in the hallway when the motion of opening the door was prematurely stopped. Something was blocking it. Pushing it hard, it gave a bit and I was able to see that a suitcase had been propped up against it.
That was a surprising development. I clutched Beth’s surprise muffin and slowly pushed the door open so the luggage wouldn’t topple over.
“Beth?” I called out. “What’s going on? Are you surprising me with that Maine trip we always talked about?” A trip would be good for me, even if it wasn’t realistic. I couldn’t call out of work Monday.
She didn’t answer. I kicked off my shoes and plopped myself on the couch in the living room.
“Will?” Her voice came from the bedroom, the only one we had. Footsteps started sounding. I ducked the muffin under the coffee table so she wouldn’t see it. She unearthed from the bedroom with a jacket zipped shut and her blond hair in a tight bun. Confusion set in.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Away.”
Silence set in.
A few moments passed.
“Away where?”
Tears set in. Her eyes, not mine.
“Away, like, I’m leaving, Will.”
Tightness began in the chest. Temples pounded. Paranoia. Not unlike the run-in with the potentially demonic woman from earlier. Beth’s face was stone cold. Her blue eyes shot icicles right into my heart. Makeup smudged her usually red cheeks.
“I’m confused,” was all I could muster.
In reality, how could I have been confused? Anybody could have sniffed this out a mile away. Anyone but me.
“I thought we were happy,” was my next attempt at rectifying the situation. Bad move.
We’d been together five years.
“I’ve invested too much time into something that isn’t working,” she said.
We were getting ready to buy a place together.
“You can’t even afford to buy a shitty one-bedroom apartment.”
Things were going to start looking up.
“You hate your job. You hate your life. How can you expect anything to get better when you won’t do anything to make it better? I can’t do it anymore. You come home everyday and complain about work and literally suck the life out of me every single day. I can’t take it anymore. You need help, Will, and I’m not the person who can help you. I’m done.”
Could there also be…
“There’s someone else.”
It made sense. How could I blame her?
“I’m so sorry. I really am. But I need someone who knows what they want. Someone who isn’t stringing me along just so I can pat them on the back and make them feel better after they had a bad day at work. I can’t do this anymore. I need to worry about my own happiness. I can’t just constantly walk on eggshells anytime you come home upset. It’s draining, Will. I can’t do it anymore.”
My mind searched for an answer. Nothing came out.
A few painfully awkward minutes later, she gathered the rest of the stuff she had packed up and was gone. The door slammed shut behind her so hard it popped back open. I got up to close it and grabbed a beer from the fridge before returning to the couch.
There was an eerie silence. The TV was on but I couldn’t hear anything.
This is the first chapter of a novel that was published in installments here on Thinking Man.
Thank you for reading. I hope you continue to follow along.
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You can also buy me a coffee. It’s a good investment—this whole thing was written in coffee shops, and it can get expensive.
Try dining in an intimate setting under fluorescent lights if you want to end your relationship, Lol! 😏
So great! You’ve set it up really well and I’m eager to read the next one. Ugh, I hate that horrid bright white light. It’s so cold and ugly; lifeless.