The Echoes of Yesterday
In the quiet town of Ashford nestled between hills and dense woodland; Lisa Williams awoke each day to the same soft chirps of sparrows outside of her bedroom window, a familiar sent of brewed coffee with a cluttered flat with a mingling scent of lavender that was kept on her windowsill.
It was ordinary – pleasant even, yet; there was an undercurrent of unease through her life, undetectable to those that brushed past her.
Lisa worked at her local bank – the usual mundane clatter of keyboards and the monotony of paperwork shaped her days.
Lately though, she felt her days had become a relentless torment from the bullying of her colleagues – it had initially started with snickers at her expense, slipping to whispers that echoed the breakroom and then transformed into outright hostility.
Laughter scraped against her skin, carving out a hollow place in her chest, one she couldn’t quite understand, a place that amidst the bank accounts and loan applications felt alien, yet oppressively familiar, like a dark shadow that remained at the very edge of her periphery.
As the week wore on, Lisa began to notice an unsettling pattern – each day echoed the last, a twisted melody that would replay; she would wake at the same hour, drink the same coffee, dress in the same clothes and reach the bank to the familiar jeers, it became predictable that she found herself finishing her colleagues’ sentences, predicting their snide remarks with an unsettling accuracy “Look who decided to show up!” a voice shout; Julia, the her voice was loud and sneering “Must have ransacked the clearance rack again”
Lisa’s heart sank as she forced a smile, a mask of indifference, as if the shield herself from the constant venom – as each day bled into another, the feelings of déjà vu seeped deeper into her very being; each evening she returned to her lonely flat surrounded by scattered dreams; Art supplies in one corner, unpaid bills on the dining table a photo album tossed out of frustration, even her conversations with her mother began to feel like a rehearsed line from a play “I’m fine; just busy” the words tasted bitter, coated in denial
By the end of the week Lisa realised she was no longer just recalling events, she was deeply entangled in a tapestry of the same days woven with threads and feelings of dread; she could predict minor details, the way barista’s would smile with faux kindness as money was exchanged for Lisa’s hastily made latte, the soft groan of a radiator in symphony with her struggles.
Growing concerned – panicked in fact, she began to document everything, she filled pages with the descriptions of her days, capturing each recycled moment; a journal of ghostly repetition she desperately tried to understand “If I can see it…, I can change it” she argued to herself, even as a foreboding weight pressed down on her
The more she wrote though, the more she felt trapped; it was almost like the ink awakened some dormant power, pulling the curtains between reality and something darker; more sinister, there were nights she would wake from dreams drenched in sweat, as shadows seem to whisper her name.
Days seemed to be an endless loop – Lisa found herself losing grip on reality, the weekends felt like a cruel joke, she would enter Saturday only to wake up on Sunday still corned by the pitiless cycle “Am I losing my mind?” she whispered to an empty room, shadows gathered within the corners, only silence answered back, heavy and oppressive
One night; crushed between the weight of isolation; Lisa sat alone in her dimly lit living room, surrounded by the turmoil of her reality.
Her journal lay open on her lap, pages filled with desperate scrawls revealing an escalating fear she shared only with herself – the clock ticked away defiantly, its rhythm both familiar and foreign, taunting her with veracity of time while slipping through her fingers “Please…, please let it change” she begged into the suffocating stillness, tears threatening to overflow
Just as resolve began to wane – a light flickered for a brief moment “That’s it….” She suddenly said, grasping at realisation “What if…, I have done this before?”
She got up, wandered around the living room slowly “What if…, I am reliving everything over and over on repeat, what if déjà vu is there to remind me what I did in the previous life…, so I can change it…, so I choose different; maybe I keep going round because I haven’t done something specific…, what if…, we are all going round and round until we get ‘it’ right”
She looked to her reflection for a moment as she approached, gently placing her finger onto the mirror “Maybe…, life is just a constant repetitive cycle of mistakes and learning; doing things until you can get it right to move on”
She let a smile curve her lips “Or…, you know you’ve just lost the plot entire Lisa” she let out a light chuckle “I think I will do something different…, lets start slow, but something significant”
On that following day she was poised at the edge of the precipice – she would be taking a leap of faith into the unknown or, possibly yet another repetitive cycle; she could only hope she could do something different, something that would mean stepping from her comfort zone, even if briefly to try, to see what direction she could try to go.
Written By: Westley H.
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