THE JOURNEY
By Mindy Graham

A long time ago…

The four words taunted Edmund from his laptop, demanding he lead them somewhere clever. To dress them in magic. His hands hovered above the keys waiting for letters to drip from his fingertips. Nothing. The white page a stark contrast to the darkness sucking his energy and every treasure into a cavern he didn’t know how to pull himself out of. Let alone anyone else. He pushed his laptop closed with more force than necessary and exhaled.
“Don’t give up.” The withered man beside him dropped the quiet words into the centimetres between them.

“Sorry?”

“Your assignment.” The man nodded his balding head towards Edmund’s laptop. “Don’t let it beat you.”

“Oh that.” Edmund shook his head. “It’s just a silly writing competition. I thought it might pass the time stuck in this flying sardine tin.” He rubbed the goosebumps on his arms and tried not to think about the 30,000 feet of thin air between him and whatever his body would slam into if–

“Not a fan of flying then?”

“Not much. You?”

“It’s okay.” The man shrugged bony shoulders that curved in on themselves. “I reckon an ol’ fella like me could tell a young bloke like you some tales from a long time ago.”

Young? Ha! At forty-two Edmund was pretty sure that label no longer fit. Besides, most days he felt a hundred years older. “Fire away.” He tucked his laptop into the sliver of space beside his thigh. “Whatever stories you tell will no doubt do a better job at distracting me than a story I was failing to write.”

The man whose name Edmund didn’t know unpacked a kaleidoscope of memories. Tales of chasing rabbits, skinned knees, and dropping from a gnarled branch into silken layers of a river so cold it stripped the air from his lungs. Of the brown-eyed girl he wooed by moonlight and clung to in hospital corridors more times than they cared to remember, raising three children in a time before Xbox.

“I still remember the moment I knew she was the one.” He shifted in his seat and sighed. “It was late afternoon; we were a pair of nineteen-year-old kids watching the sun dance like diamonds across the river. A family of ducks swam past as we dangled our feet from the jetty, and in that heartbeat, I knew I’d been born to love her.”

Something grey and cold turned inside Edmund’s chest, twisting his own golden memory. He rubbed his thumb over the band of steel on his left hand. How had they even gotten to this place?

“You’re married.”

It wasn’t a question, but Edmund nodded anyway. “Sixteen years.”

“Kids?”

“Twin boys. They’ll be eleven next month. Hugh wants to build rockets for NASA and Patrick thinks he’s the next Keith Urban.”

“Lovely.”

“Yeah.”

“That was convincing.”

“No, it is. Really, they’re great.”

“But?”

“Nothing. It’s all good.” Edmund checked his watch. Another forty minutes and they’d be landing. What would be waiting for him this time? He squinted at the blue infinity broken only by lazy cotton wool clouds behind his travel companion’s shoulder.

“It’s tough isn’t it?”

Edmund tried on a smile which belonged to a different version of himself.

“It’s okay to admit it. We’ve all been there. Even those friends on that Facebook thingo you lot collect like our generation did Weet-bix cards. The ones with the perfect jobs and kids and a wife who greets them with a passionate kiss every afternoon. It’s not real. Not one hundred percent of the time.”

Edmund adjusted the overhead air outlet. What was wrong with the air conditioning in this thing?

“Oh, stop your squirming. I might be old, but I still remember what kissing a beautiful woman is like.”

Silence hovered between them, swallowed by the engine’s hum and the clatter of the steward’s trolley up the aisle.

“I took my girl home today.” The words came so soft Edmund almost missed them. “Back to where we began. To the diamonds on the river. I sat in our spot and held her in my arms one last time.” The old man’s voice trembled. “But I’ll always carry her in my memories. And here.” His hand covered his heart for a moment, his eyes shimmering with tears.

“I…” The rest of Edmund’s sentence lodged like a walnut in his throat.

“It’s okay, son. My advice? You can’t ever pray or love too much.”

A frail hand with paper thin skin squeezed Edmund’s arm. A hand that knew the weight of both grief and grace. Had sifted life and held onto the good.

***

An hour later, the plastic chair of an airport café dug into Edmund’s spine as the stranger’s wisdom seeped into his soul. He took a sip of his short black and washed down the last mouthful of a day-old cinnamon donut as he smoothed the creases from the oil-stained white paper bag. He lost himself in a memory he should never have let life steal. He slid a pen from the pocket of his laptop case and began to write on the bag.

A long time ago we sat on the hood of my old beat-up Datsun dunking donuts into our vanilla milkshakes watching the sunset.
Let’s do it again.
E
p.s. I almost forgot what I wrote on the donut bag that night. I’m sorry. Let’s make sure we always remember.