“Still roaming the Earth, Lydia?”
“Still being the messenger boy, Gabe? You know they have e-mail for that now.”
“Perhaps, but our servers never go down.”
“Couldn’t help but notice..”
“What?”
“That there’s seems to be an…oh, how to put it, issue? No, that doesn’t have quite the ring to it. How to rephrase it in a way that will annoy you…”
“Too late for that.”
“Looks like you'll have to send someone down.”
“Maybe, or maybe we’re already on it.”
“Ooh always on the ball, are we? Especially for a beloved child’s crucial night.”
“Tonight's his crucial night. You're right.”
“We'll have to send someone down immediately. Whose turn is it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t that what you do? Go and deliver messages? Along with a sarcastic barb or two? I’m sure he just needs a little tough love. Or maybe gentler hands are needed. Are there any clock-maker angels left?
“No.”
“So you’re going to let him flounder, on the darkest night of his life.”
“He’s had darker. You should know.”
“At exactly six forty-five P.M., Pacific Standard time he will be thinking seriously of throwing away God's greatest gift.”
“And this is the part where I say: ‘Oh, dear, dear! His life! Then I have only an hour to get ready!’ I’ll be fashionably late then.”
“Is that how the angels work?”
“You have no idea what God’s greatest gift is, do you?”
“Seems to me, neither does Jason Dennereck.”

All Is Well
Based on the characters from “The Strange Case of Jason Dennereck” and “A Window to Your Heart”

“It’s A Wonderful Life” line references by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra,
Special thanks to: Erin Woodall and Tiffany Ording

Somewhere in My Memory

Someone once said that if you keep dreaming for something, it eventually comes true. I will say that I once believed in that. Not that I believed in genies, leprechauns, or in my luck in winning the grand prize in the McDonald’s Monopoly game. Not that I thought that money was the answer to all of my problems, but perhaps it would solve a few issues in life: like student loans and the lack of owning a car. Picture if you will, a college student away from home (about four hundred miles) without a car to get around when he wants to. Yes, I could…I could use public transportation but sometimes the buses were not running at the times when I wanted to chuck my books, dorm life and messy-leaves-so-many-crumbs-around-Im-freaking-shocked-we-don’t-have-a-colony-of-roaches roommate! No, they didn’t work on my timetable…not much ever did. If only…
If only I went to another college, somewhere in the south, arriving on a campus that wasn’t always enveloped in a drizzly-haze three hundred and sixty-two days a year, with the remaining three resulting in a snow-covered campus, perhaps somewhere closer to her.

But it wasn’t meant to be. Even after calling her and writing a letter or two, all I could do was ask how the weather was and how she was doing in school. I couldn’t tell her how much I liked, infatuated, enraptured…maybe, just plain in love with her, even though I would have to admit I didn’t really know her as much as I should have to have such an attachment.

And then, in high school, I tried to keep up with a girl who went to another school but it was so difficult to arrange a time to get together. We talked a lot on the phone and I wanted to take things up to the next level, maybe even go as far as I thought I could when I was in junior high—I was braver then, more so in my dreams than in reality, but at least in my dreams I could fight the dragon and win the girl in the end.

Getting the girl…something that I could not do, so I stopped trying. There was a memory of Tiffany in my mind, but it was of a person I envisioned her to be and not really her, so I tried to fade her from my head, to try and not compare every other girl out there to my dream. I fought to compare Charlotte to Tiffany but there was so much about her that reminded me—like they were twins, twins with a slight height difference, different color hair and completely opposite attitudes…perhaps fraternal twins of some type to me.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t shake either of them out of my daily existence and my freshman year of college didn’t help as it reminded me of my first days at Prattville Junior High and my first few days at a week-long camp called Centrifuge. The problem was that the two who helped me the most, the two I who, directly and indirectly, helped me keep my sanity, were not there and so I reached back and thought of WWTD or WWCD to help me in those situations. Perhaps I should have looked for a better life coach. Perhaps I should have actually read the Bible I had on the desk in my dorm room. Or, perhaps, I really should have gone out and made some actual friends.

I left the University of Washington campus and took several buses to the Greyhound station where I faced a six hour bus ride—six hours if the passes were not impacted by snow. So, with my old-school CD player and a backpack full of AA batteries, I tried to clear my head of everything on the way back to Spokane.

The bus filled with other college students, almost to full capacity, with a few seats empty here and there. A part of me kind of wanted someone to sit near me; maybe Keith would appear from the front of the bus, sit down next to me and comment on the fact that I avoided asking Tiffany out yet once again and I would have to feign the bitterness and hurt I felt even though he was absolutely right. Or maybe Kyle would swing in from the back and comment on how a blind girl was able to annihilate me playing Skee-Ball. Charlotte said she did it by sound and the feel of the skee-ball in her hand. I had the gall to think she wasn’t really blind, just blind without glasses, but, she really was.

I leaned my head back and tried to think of happier events in my life but I couldn’t as those WERE happier times in my life. The darkness outside the bus, along with the falling snow, made it impossible to focus on anything else but my depressed disposition looking back at me in the fogged-up glass.
Maybe my parents wouldn’t be at the station…maybe they would let me fend for myself to get home, which would have made me feel great: as I could simply freeze and never be found until the spring time. Not that I WANTED to end my life at that moment in time.
I actually had thought about it several times since the start of school.
From throwing myself off the roof of of my dorm to somehow ramming through a window at the Space Needle but each time I thought about doing it, something would stop me—usually someone would appear around the corner or I would be distracted.
One day maybe I would succeed.
Again, I didn’t want to, but at that time, there wasn’t a lot to hope for.
The bus arrived in Spokane shortly after 9:30 PM.
I had exhausted all of my batteries for my CD player and my Gameboy was useless after the lights in the bus had gone out so I tried to sleep the rest of the way but, as I already harped on, the regrets of my past kept me awake.
“Jason!” My dad shouted as he guided my mother through the crowds up to me. I had already grabbed my bags and didn’t drop them as they came up to me.
“How was your trip?” Mom asked.
“Long.”
“You hungry?” Dad asked as he tried to grab a bag, I shook my head to both offers.
“No, I just want to rest a bit more.”
“Hard to sleep on a bus, eh?”
“Yeah. I envied everyone else who could.”
My parents went back and forth about the news about construction in the city and life in the country. I nodded and replied with monosyllabic grunts, along with a few “yeah”’s and “uh-huh”’s. We arrived at the house thirty minutes later and I immediately went to my old room, closed the door, and sprayed myself on top of the bed. I never even took off my shoes.

My parents had always accepted my moods, plus it was late—for them at least—and maybe they thought it was best to talk more in the morning. I could tell them about vast escapades at school! How I single-handedly saved a failing drama project and brought everything back into order for opening night. How I was asked to write a “Folly” for an upcoming fair; and top item off with the starting script for a madrigal.
They would either say, “wow” or simply nod their heads and tell me “congratulations”. Then I would feel miserable for lying and be back in the same predicament I had arrived in: full-on depression. I didn’t need a doctor to tell me I was sick. No, I had the heard l’appel du vide on several occasions since I arrived at college. It was a calming voice. Soothing to hear as one stares out from the 14th—but in reality—13th floor of their dorm building—looking across the sky to remember things from the past that were not depressing.
And only one person came to mind at those times. I would try to think back to those days—the days I wanted to have happen if time had not separated us. If I reached out and strained hard enough, could she appear? If only for a day? Would the days at school been less traumatic if I could talk to her between classes or at lunch? Something I never got to do back then.
But, all I had were the two pictures of her in my yearbook and
But, all I had were the two pictures of her in my yearbook and the imagined version of her in my head. I had called her once, and like it was foretold, all I could do was ask her was: “how’s the weather?” I wanted to tell her something and I had rehearsed what I would say time after time, but when she came on the phone line all the gumption I built up vanished when she said “hello”.
I couldn’t tell her I loved her back then.
Nor could I tell her later on in life.
I still missed Tiffany.