Forever Yours
Lori Khadse
Dear Anthony,
I’d ask how you are, but I already know. That, and I know you wouldn’t answer, because you wouldn’t want to confirm that you’re still in that God-forsaken town, sifting through the rubble of a destroyed Coca Cola factory among the ruins of a civil war. I know your mind still hasn’t moved on from 1976, stuck in a time that will only ever ‘have been.’
The epic of my teenage years was backing down from jumping off the Roucher Rock. Yeah, the one in Peru, bombed twenty years later, unlucky enough to be surrounded by restless people fighting against their own country.
Needless to say, I never went back.
The epic of your teenage years was successfully jumping off that rock.
Needless to say, you never came back.
For twenty years, you’ve been stuck in the same memory, in the same year, in the same town.
But that’s alright, because I’m stuck there, too. Your death suspended more than just your dream to travel the world at 18. I’ve been trying to keep you at the back of my mind, but every so often I’ll hear you downing drinks and drunk dancing with the rest of my regrets, crossing paths with parts of my past that even I didn’t know of.
In my dreams, when I turn to look you in the eye, I see us standing by the cliff all over again. I see you flash me a teasing smile before you disappear over the horizon.
I’d ask how you feel, trapped in an eternal loop, a twisted manipulation of dream logic, but I already know–
because I’m trapped in there with you.
Forever yours,
J.C.
Lori Khadse is a junior at Rutgers University. Her photography, visual art, and creative writing are published in literary journals like Short Édition, The Apprentice Writer, Polyphony Lit, and A Lack of Clarity. She’s also a Crisis Text Line Counselor, an EMT, and the founder and editor in chief of The Elysian Muse, an online youth literary magazine that focuses mental health amongst youth.
Lori wrote this story in a creative writing course taught by Professor Lindsay Haber, who selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.