There's No Place Like Here (2009) by Ahern Cecilia

Author:Ahern, Cecilia [Ahern, Cecilia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-03-26T18:05:39+00:00

28

I stared up at the ceiling, at the point right above my head where the white paint had bubbled and cracked over the wood. The moon was sitting perfectly framed in the window of the family room I was sleeping in. Blue light was cast through the glass, causing an exact reflection of its window squares to appear on the chunky wooden table. There was no moon in the window on the table, I noticed, just a ghostly reflection of pale blue.

I was wide awake now. I felt for my wrist to check the time and remembered again my watch was gone. My heart started to pound as it always did when something of mine was missing; I would immediately become restless and ache to start looking. My hunts were like an addiction, the pre-search feeling like a craving. A part of me was possessed and became obsessed with not resting until my belongings were found. There was very little anybody could do when I was in that mode; there was very little that could be said or done to cause me to screech in my tracks. The people with me always used to tell me it was lonely for them when I left them like that all of a sudden. Everybody I was with was always the victim; didn't they know that it was lonely for me, too?

"But the pen is not your missing object," Gregory would always say to me.

"Yes, it is," I would grumble, while rooting in my bag, nose practically touching the bottom.

"No, it's not. When you search you are trying to fulfil a feeling. Whether you have the pen or not is completely irrelevant, Sandy."

"It is not irrelevant," I would shout back. "If I have no pen, well, then, how can I write down what you are about to tell me?"

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me a pen. "Here."

"But that isn't my pen."

He would sigh and smile as he always did. "This idea of searching for lost things is a distraction--"

"Distraction, distraction, distraction, distraction. Never mind me; you are obsessed with saying that word. You saying the word distraction is your distraction from saying anything else," I spluttered angrily.

"Let me finish," he said sternly.

I stopped rooting immediately and listened to him, feigning interest.

"This idea of searching for lost things is a distract..."--he stopped himself--"is a way of avoiding dealing with something else that's lost in your life within you. Now shall we start searching for what that is?"

"A-ha!" I smiled, happily extracting my pen from the bottom of my bag. "Found it!"

Unfortunately for Gregory, the craving never reared its ugly head anytime we would try to search within me.

If there had been a ten-foot wall surrounding the house, I would have scaled it. There was no barrier to my search scenes; all they did was become invisible hurdles. Gregory did have one good thing to say about my searching, and that was that he had never seen stamina and determination quite like it.

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