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My name is Martin Higgins and the year is 2024.
There isn’t much to say about my life except that I live just outside Appleton, Wisconsin, my eye bags refuse to budge no matter how much I sleep and I have also never been to Washington, DC.
It’s a honey trap for tourists and school field trips; obnoxiously large monuments, museums, The White House. It’s a place I’ve been uneasily drawn to.
Ken, one of my buddies back home, says it’s also the hub for secret societies where they sacrifice virgins and control all of the world’s resources. He only talks like that when he’s had a few too many, the rest of the guys and I like to laugh at and encourage his theories, to which he happily obliges. I don’t laugh as hard as the rest, and against my better judgment, my questions are a little too sincere.
I shake my head. No need to be one of those conspiratorial loons. I’m just a tourist from Wisconsin, standing in front of The White House wrapped up in a beanie and heavy coat for the impending East Coast winter. Nothing more.
“Come on! I don’t want to rush you by saying we’re going to be late, but I may need to leave you behind.” An eager voice calls from behind me as a man in a perfectly pressed suit and a large smile jumps out of a cab. He is the epitome of a child crossed with a golden retriever in a frat bro’s body. His slicked hair bounces with every step. I turn back with my phone in my hands to take a picture of The White House.
“Calm down. You’d miss me if I wasn’t there with you.” A bored but paradoxically amused sounding woman says.
Miss me…You’d miss me…I know if it were possible, you’d miss me too.
Those words from that voice. What does that even mean? Why are they so familiar?
Everything goes black.
I blink my vision clear. I’m still standing outside The White House. My phone is face down on the ground. Why am I gasping? Did I forget to breathe or something?
“Well, of course. It is my BFF’s birthday present.”
My head whips towards the sound of the man’s voice and my eyes lock onto the woman’s profile as she merges into the crowd. A brunette with worn eyes like mine. Despite her tired appearance, she’s smiling. She’s so beautiful.
A tender kiss on my jaw as I sleep, a fleeting memory. That voice, that face. She’s gone.
I raise a shaking hand to where this phantom kiss lay, my fingertips leave my skin warm and wet. A flood of emotion comes so thick in my throat and heavy in my stomach that I lean against the black railing to keep myself from doubling over. My knuckles turn white from the grip on the metal, my left hand claws at my chest like it’s the jaws of life trying to free my rapidly beating heart. I press my forehead against the cold metal as I try to calm myself. Three words repeatedly push themselves to the front of my mind without my permission, and without clear reason as to why, they carry the most honest feeling I have ever experienced.
I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.