Morning all and welcome to Wednesday. Isn’t this week just flying by? Maybe it is just me. I came back from a week away to find a full inbox and no slowing down. I’m kind of looking forward to the slow down of the weekend actually. But there is time before then. So let’s see what today’s prompt brings us. Timers at the ready and off we go.
Huh. I think I had two separate ideas jangling together. They sort of straightened out, but I think I’d have to reread this and expand to see what I was really thinking. If that makes sense.
Wednesday, August 2nd: They were a long way from home.
They were a long way from home. Somehow that thought hadn’t percolated into his mind when he agreed to join the group. He knew intellectually that it was going to be a long way from home. It was an entirely different planet in an entirely different galaxy after all, even he hadn’t missed that. Yet somehow it didn’t occur to him that it would matter. That it would feel like such a long way.
In truth it was the odder things about this new planet where he was making his home that he was having an easier time dealing with. Those alien things were just things from here. There were other things though, things that from the corner of his eye looked like creatures, plants or even land masses from home. Then he would turn to them, and they would suddenly be something alien. It was surprisingly, the shape of the mountain that was the hardest for him. When he didn’t look at it directly, it looked like the mountain where his grandfather and extended family lived. There was a completely unexpected sense of homecoming and then when he turned to face it head on there was an almost crushing sense of loss.
He knew the others had those who they left behind. For him, it was different. All of them were gone now. There was no one left behind. They were long since gone, their ashes scattered. There was no0 one left for him. It was why he thought he would be such a good candidate. He was starting fresh with no one to miss. And yet here he was, somehow missing those who were gone.
‘Stupid,’ he thought as he once again felt the sharp pain. He got over his grief with each loss, or though he had, long ago. ‘Idiot mountain.’ He thought trying to make the mountain take some of the blame for his emotions. Somehow it was coming to represent the vast gulf in space and time between his present self and his past. He didn’t like it. Elliot was a man who liked to live in the moment. It was why his last two wives left him. The first one married him thinking that eventually he would learn to look past the moment and plan for the future. When she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she went and planned a future without him.
His second wife loved that he lived in the moment with no thought of the future, unfortunately it was a trait they shared. She left him for a better now. If he was honest, this was, in a small way an attempt to plan for the future. The fact that his past suddenly decided to intervene when he finally decided to look forward made him feel somehow cheated.
It wasn’t a logical feeling, he knew that, but there he was. He had been through enough mandatory sessions with the company therapist to at least recognize the problem even if he hadn’t found a solution.
‘The solution would be to blow up a part of the mountain so it no longer looks so much like home,’ he thought. Somehow, he doubted anyone would agree with him. He also doubted anyone would let him walk into their supply depot and simply take the necessary explosives with him when he left. He imagined there would be questions and while his sessions were the same general ones everyone took now, he imagined if he started blowing off chucks of a mountain with explosives because it reminded him of his grandfather, his sessions with the therapist would be less routine and a bit more invasive than he cared for.
Ten til Midnight 