Somewhere in NYC

The next day passes in much the same way and then on Monday you are forced to go to work. You play with the idea of calling in sick again so you don’t have to go through the whole thing of not knowing what the hell is going on and not being able to do anything at all, before deciding that you should probably get on with life and earn some money, and you already have a job in New York City; people would kill for that. You suppose you better get doing it.

Alex directs you to one of the smaller buildings down a side road that you are grateful for, not as many floors to navigate and inevitably get lost in. Alex has to leave you outside as he also has a job to get to and you understand but it’s still a scarier place without him all the same.

The receptionist says good morning to you as you walk in, so you smile at her and give her a wave and hope that is about the most interaction that you normally do. She doesn’t make any comment on it, so you guess it’s alright.

You have a piece of paper that says “third floor, room 6B” on it, and when you find the room it seems to primarily be just two desks and two computers. Presumably you share a room with a colleague, but they aren’t here yet anyway, which gives you chance to look through the papers on your desk and log in to the computer without someone asking why you look so confused at all the words that pop up.

Thankfully most of your job seems to be looking for new bands and signing them to this record, which seems like something you would choose and also something reasonably easy to do. You have twenty cd’s on your desk and a list of names with the heading “call list for meeting” because you’ve been out of the office for a couple of days and things obviously pile up quickly around here. With a resigned sigh, you start researching the list of bands first and ringing them up to arrange a meeting; it’s not so hard once you get in to it.

Around an hour in your colleague arrives, running a hand through his hair and collapsing heavily in his chair, and you have a feeling you should be more surprised to see it's Matt Flyzick, but you also have a feeling nothing would surprise you that much anymore, and who else would it be anyway.

“Hey…” you venture.

“Morning,” is the snappy reply. “Traffic has a fucking nerve I swear to God sometimes I don’t know why the hell I’m so fucking eager to live in this God forsaken city.”

Oh. Bad mood, obviously.

“Where have you been anyway? I’ve had to do some of your work while you away you know, no need to thank me or anything.”

“Um, thanks…” you say. “I was sick.”

“You better have been dying on your death bed, Barakat.”

The conversation dies down until a lot later when you go to get a coffee from the machine and he follows.

“Hey,” he starts softly, “are you okay? I was just in a bad mood earlier, I hope you’re feeling better.”

You struggle to keep a laugh in. Although earlier you thought Matt in this world might just be even more of an asshole than you bargained for, apparently he’s exactly the same as you remember.

“It’s cool, man,” you say, “forget it.”

“So you’re feeling better?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“Good,” he smiles.

The next few days follow in much the same pattern, with angry outbursts from Matt now and again and a loving boyfriend to go back to every evening, it’s beginning to feel more homely than home.

You’re still thinking you hear people saying your name when you don’t and more than once you could swear you hear Flyzik say something when he says he didn't, but you guess that’s just the voice of reason in your head, and not something completely out of the usual for a day in your “past life” as you’ve taken to calling it.

Alex has been doing research on whether anyone has experienced anything like this before, and so far ‘reincarnation’ and ‘coma’ are the only words repeatedly reoccurring; and you don’t believe in reincarnation, and you’re not in a coma as far as anyone knows, so you kick away those ideas before they can take root. He also found out that some children think that they can remember a past life and past family but although you act like a kid more often than not, you aren't actually a kid, and the definition doesn't exactly fit your circumstance anyway, so you doubt it's that either.

It’s still scary whenever you stop to think about it, but with the job, Alex and being in New York City you don’t have much quiet time alone to yourself anyway, and you’re not thinking about it as much as you were a few days ago. Everyone treating you as if you’re supposed to be here is helping you feel as though you are and to be honest you’re enjoying it here. You might not want to leave.

One of the only times you do have time to consider what the fuck is going on is when you get back to the apartment ten minutes before Alex, and you’re so lost in your thoughts of it all that you don’t hear the door go or him entering the apartment until he’s collapsing on the sofa and nuzzling in to your arm. You move it so you can wrap it around his shoulders and you find yourself feeling suddenly protective.

“You alright?” you both ask at the time.

“No, you,” you both say at the same time again, making you laugh more.

“Yeah…” you reply, “it’s just, it’s still weird.”

“You still can’t remember then?”

“I don’t know… I mean, it just still doesn’t feel quite right that I can't remember anything recent but… maybe it’s not about remembering.” You pause unsure of where you’re going with this sentence. “Maybe it’s about making the most of this. I’m sorry I don’t remember everything but it doesn’t feel wrong, does it?”

“It doesn’t. It hasn’t really changed you all that much.”

“Have I always been this beautifully philosophical?”

“Oh yeah,” Alex says semi-jokingly, “you’re like a Greek god.”

What you don’t tell Alex, mainly because you think he might get scared of you and call you crazy, is that the voices you were first hearing are now getting more and more obvious and less and less easy to ignore. At some points you think you hear your mom and dad, at other points your sister, and a lot of the time it’s the voices of Matt, Rian, Zack, Dany and other friends you have in the crew; but most disconcertingly of all, a lot of the time you think you can hear Alex which is harder to easily ignore when sometimes you can’t work out whether it’s from the present time and actually hear Alex, or the voice in your head Alex.

The voices in your head used to make you feel upset or guilty, as that is how they sounded, but now they seem to have calmed down they’re not getting you as down either. You just hope they go away and stop disrupting your life sooner rather than later.

The New York sky rise apartment now feels like home to you, and you have begun to imagine liking living here for a prolonged period of time. For one thing the view is to die for; you’re not usually that much of a sucker for scenery, but you don’t think you’ll ever get bored at looking at this view, and, you're reminded as Alex wraps his arms around your waist from behind, your boyfriend's not too bad either.