Member-only story
Catharsis Chronicles November competition: The person I used to be
One Step Closer
A story about the inevitability we sometimes walk into
Chrysa Stergiou asked us to write about the last completely ordinary day before something happened that changed our lives forever. The narrator — the current us — knows what is coming. Our younger self does not.
Well… I still remember that day. My life can be split into Before and After. I don’t know if you guys have had such an event in your lives, but I have. Two different lives, two different versions of me.
Come for a walk through the day the life of the first of them ended.
I see her.
She is beautiful. That’s the first thing I notice, and it surprises me. I expected to see a tiny girl, crumpled like a worn-out dress, but instead, there she walks, her back straight, eyes sparkling, hair bobbing up and down, heading toward a small clothes store on one of Sofia’s central shopping streets. And she is… oh, my, she looks like a queen.
“These pants,” she says, and her melodic voice startles me, too. God knows why I expected her to mumble. Why do I remember myself as a tiny village shack when I was actually a space tower? “Yes, the brown ones. Is this the smallest…
