Page 1 of Remember When We
Prologue
Gio
&
Lyssa
Gio
* * *
It always felt cold in here.
Even when the place was being used this damn parking lot felt cold all year round. Cold like death.
Back then I compared it to the coldness of death, because that was what death felt like to me. Cold and hard. Cruel. Death took and never gave back.
Hope was gone and there was nothing to hold on to.
Now abandoned, the parking lot felt the same.
I was eighteen when Ma died after her years of struggling with leukemia.
She was the first person in my life to die. The first person that I truly cared about. I never knew my grandparents. They died years before I was born so I never knew what it would feel like to lose someone close. With Ma, it felt like the world had ended. It ended and after all we’d been through with Pa. All the pain his unfaithfulness caused her. I was always in the middle of their disputes that actually got worse even after their divorce. I knew deep down Pa resented me for wanting to stay with her in Philadelphia, even though I technically spent my summers in Chicago with him. It was the only time I had away from her. The last time I came home and only had one whole day with her before I found her in the kitchen dead.
It looked like she just must have collapsed. Doctors said she didn’t feel any pain in her death.
My world ended, but I knew it would happen. I knew she was going to die and never blamed myself.
Not the way I did for Marshall’s death. Definitely not like that. He was the good kid a guy like me should never have gotten mixed up with.
People say you make your own choices, but I knew the truth.
You are influenced by those around you to make those choices. If your influencer is bad, then you’re guaranteed to make fucked up decisions to screw you over in the worst way possible.
That was what happened to him.
Because of me.
The last time I walked this path there was police tape sectioning off the bays over there by the window. The window wasn’t broken then and the vines of ivy growing through the crack weren’t there either.
The only familiar thing was that the place was still cold.
Bay 1-4, eight years ago was sectioned off and on the ground was the standard crime scene drawing of a body on the floor. The man was my best friend Marshall Carson. He was shot dead in a gang shoot out.
Or so I had thought…
* * *
Lyssa
My heart …
My heart squeezed and stopped. I swore it stopped beating right there in my chest.
I looked on not quite knowing if I’d strayed into a dream or if life had dealt it’s last card on me and taken my sanity.
Eight years of hell could do that to a person and I didn’t know how sometimes I got from one day to the next.
