déjà vu

 I entered Round 8 of NPR's Three-Minute Fiction contest. The requirements for entry were to create an original work of short fiction, no more than 600 words. And it had to begin with this sentence: "She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door."

This is the first time I have ever submitted anything I've written. As a trained designer, I am no stranger to the fear of rejection. My writing process is very similar to that of my design process and philosophies. Design/Write for yourself. The audience needs to be considered, but create something you are proud to put your name to. Pursue all ideas, bad ones especially. Sometimes you just have to get the bad ideas out of your head to make room for more inspiration to jitter as you drink coffee, but very often I have found that those turn out to be some of the best in the end.

So with a beverage in hand, I invite you to read and encourage opinions. Just like in design, one never improves without being able to take in criticism, constructive and destructive.

déjà vu

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. With her hand fixed on the silver knob of the front door, she looked over her shoulder for one last glance at her other option, the back door; its brass knob glowed with a yellow intensity. In the instant her confidence in her decision solidified, déjà vu shattered her known life into pieces like a porcelain vase falling from the mantle. 

“I’ve been here before.” The words came out in an exhale of realization of what she had thought impossible. 

The white walls of the room became a blank canvas for her life seventy one years earlier.  The bouncing ponytail of her former twenty three year old self bounded across the quad for the last of her college finals, the post-exam celebration and then the images flickered to a reality she had believed to have only been a dream. The bright head lights, the hum of an engine, the squealing of brakes echoed in the room. 

“But that was only a dream I had. I remember it because it was so…” Her voice trailed off; the words ‘life like’ were caught in her throat before they tumbled out.

Her eyes widened as all the walls returned to their original sterile state.  Instead, the back door flickered. A hand appeared on the brass knob, unwrinkled and unblemished, but it had the same nail bitten fingers. With wide eyes, she locked stares with herself making the choice she had made all those years ago. Instead of selecting the front door, she had chosen the back. Opening the door and stepping through seemed to push a rewind button. The events that she had just watched reversed until she was waking up the morning of her last finals with the strange feeling that she had already experienced that exact same morning only to dismiss it as déjà vu.

“I’ve died before.” In that moment she knew the power behind déjà vu and the choice that was before her. “I went back because I wasn’t ready to give up my life. There was so much I wanted to do, that I wanted to be.” 

With a deep inhale, she knew she was ready this time. The dream or once reality she had experienced, and the facts of her life chronicled in the book she had left on the table were all a part of her life. This temporary place between the known and unknown was a gift of reflection upon life in the simplest way. A choice had been given to her in the past and was being given again. 

Twisting the silver knob, the front door swung open. She smiled as she set off into the unknown, knowing that the book of her life she had left behind on the table had ended but the next was just beginning.