HAZEL
Decades ago, she sat in silence at the kitchen table, drinking cheap wine and reading her tabloids, as was her daily routine. A day like any other, bleeding from one to the next like open wounds. The only sounds to be heard were the flipping of the pages between her yellowed tobacco stained fingers and the branches of the weeping willow gently brushing against the window in the wind's embrace. As the rain fell, so to did she, albeit to sleep. She drifted in and out of consciousness by design, in a seemingly never ending effort to make it stop. She just wanted it all to go away. The memories, even the good ones, they haunted her. The accident played out in her mind daily and nightly, which eventually grew mundane. It was the good memories that drained her though. Her husband and their two daughters, alive, just simply alive in the moments they had shared. It were those memories that completely devoured her.
She just wanted it to stop. She never wanted to exist in another moment without them.
Meanwhile just around the corner...
MICHELLE
She gazed out the kitchen window on an unseasonably warm Saturday in November of 1989, watching her young boys playing blissfully on the new swing set in the freshly mowed back yard. Her soapy hands were doing the dishes but her mind was somewhere else again. She would lose minutes at a time on a regular basis, leaving herself, pondering time and the hand it will deal her family.
Her husband, sweaty and tired from the yard work, thudded down in his recliner with a Pabst Blue Ribbon in one filthy hand and reached down for the remote with the other. It was Hockey Night In Canada and in this house they bled Blue & White. He wasn't ever much for communication, more of a grunter, and this day was no different. He was a typical hard working beer drinking Canadian dad making the most of his factory worker, rural family life.
It never mattered if he loved her, or if he ever loved her. Once she was pregnant, that was just that. He wasn't the type of man to walk away from anything, or towards it, for that matter. Oh but she, she loved him from the moment they met, and still does.
Years before, she gave up trying to force the bedtime routine on the kids on Saturday nights. This was boys night, the only family activity for which she had no part in. No responsibility. She could just sit and watch, not the game, but rather her family. The boys would excitedly cheer for the Leafs to exhaustion over two periods and then fall asleep during the third in a pile on their father.
All she ever wanted was for one of those Saturday nights to last forever. That's where her mind went. That is what she got lost in.
Sometimes when one can't uncover the real story, one's imagination runs wild.
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