Normal is when you wake up in your own fluffy bed to the beeping of an alarm clock. Normal is when your morning is peaceful and unbothered. Normal is.... well, this was not a normal morning...
Eli woke up and her whole body was stiff. Stiff like she had climbed a mountain the day or something. She slowly opened her sleepy eyes to put on her glasses when she realized that she could still see perfectly without them. Why was she still wearing her contacts? Eli looked around and saw that she was in a washed out pale room. She couldn't believe it. She was STILL waking up in strange places. There was nothing there except a small tv, a bedstand and some wilting flowers.
She had been in somewhere like this before. It was when she was 12 and her family had decided to go check out their newly bought apartment in New York City. Yes, buying apartments in such expensive places were all in the name of fun entertainment for her family. This was a "family vacation" or at least, that's what they tried to call it. All she and her sister did was look at twenty-something apartments. Eli came from old money, old family money that lasted multiple generations thanks to her miserly ancestors. Eli remembered visiting the apartment and going into one of the rooms. Her mother had redecorated the whole place except for this one room. Naturally, the only room Eli liked was this room. The room had a tiny retro brown tv that was placed on top of a tv box. There was a plain white bed with a matching bedstand. Eli's mom had tried to decorate it by placing some flowers on top of the stand. A month had passed since anyone gave any water to the poor lilies and it made them look so sad, wilting away, their beauty diminishing. She remembered just sitting on the edge of the bed, touching the wilted flowers and dreaming of leaving the grasps of her parents. She felt like she was one of the flowers, suffocating under the hold of her parents, unable to grow, unable to blossom, unable to breathe. She tried to save the lilies by giving them water, but Eli ended up drowning them.
That's all Eli could remember from her trip to New York. But the wilting flowers in this room was enough to bring back the frustrating memory. As her eyes started to adjust to the gleam of sunlight coming through the windows, Eli decided to stop daydreaming and get up to explore.
The sudden jerk caused Eli to fall back down on the bed. She hadn't registered in her mind yet that she had a sharp needle in her arm, and finding out after almost yanking it out of the grasps of the tight tape protection was not a fun thing. Eli tried to get up again, this time, holding onto her IV stand. While she walked around the room, trying to figure out what got her here, a doctor and a nurse walked into the room.
" Hello Ms....."
"Ms. Rosenthal."
"Yes, Ms. Rosenthal. Well, we have here in our records that someone found you passed out in front of the Castle Apartment entrance doors so they brought you here. He was a very nice fellow too, but he left without giving us any contact information."
" How bad is my condition?"
" Oh, it wasn't anything serious. Just a mild case of nerves and stress."
" When do you think I can go back home then, doctor?"
" I'd say, oh whenever you feel like it."
Whenever she feels like it???? Eli thought this doctor was a big fat phony. He had the voice and the signature smile of an infomercial host. He was not the sophisticated intellectual she imagined all doctors would be like. There was something very odd about him. The nurse, who fidgeted with pulling out the IV was no better. In fact, she slightly scared Eli with the complete monotone voice and lack of expressions. She seemed like the type who could murder someone and feel no remorse. But maybe, Eli was being a bit too dramatic.
As Eli started to leave the hospital building she saw a familiar woman leaving as well. She was tall, slim, and, looked, well, like a model. Except her face had no trace of the common carefree, naive, 'oh look at me I'm a model' look that most models Eli knew of had. Eli definitely had seen her fair share of models while working for Forever 21. However, this girl looked grim, almost depressed.
It wasn't until the girl got out her phone to make a call that Eli recognized her as the recently-burnt-down Forever 21 manager-Petra.
CRAP. She still had all of this girl's stuff from her apartment. Wasn't she thinking of giving it to her as a Christmas present? How had she forgotten?
Eli tried to run after her but she lost sight of the girl as she turned the corner. Then, Eli remembered that she still had Petra's phone number.
She called Petra up and explained the whole story on how she ended up with a bag full of her stuff. The transaction took a much shorter time than Eli had anticipated. They met up at a coffee shop and talked briefly before she handed Petra the bags. But right as they were about to leave Eli became curious.
" So, what are you thinking to do, now that the store's burned down?"
" I'm deciding whether or not I should go to New York."
Maybe this was a sign, her last chance to depart from her past once and for all. After sitting down again and explaining why she wanted to give her apartment to a stranger (although having met three times before), Eli handed the ancient keys to Petra and went out the door.
Suddenly, the air seemed minty, almost refreshing. Never had this town smelled refreshing before. Eli remembered her first day to this town when the air literally smelled like rotting sulfur.
Who would've guessed keeping those despicable keys in her purse would help relieve her stress and also maybe give another person a new start?
While walking home, she tried to remember what caused her to feint. She really hadn't been doing too much work to have over-exhaustion. WORK! oh no, she had completely forgotten about her new job at the post office!
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