In Tomorrow's Time

> Chapter 04 -Alfie's Confusions <

Stupid was my middle name, but only because Walkers was last. Carrying the violin up and down the stairs was unbearable, and I hated it so much. Why the violin? Because it's what she liked and loved, and I had to do it to change everything.

I had forgotten something while I was running through the rain, carrying that horrible, heavy case with the instrument. At least I hadn't forgotten the umbrella. I mean, forgetting it with the rain clearly falling would be the height of questionable memory.

I rushed to put some things away in the classroom, bumping into students and being careful not to slip on the small puddles of water from a freshly closed umbrella. Without judgment, mine was doing the same for the others; someone was bound to fall.

The music lessons were very complicated, I mean, most of them were practical, and I couldn't keep up. Anyway, I had to play and rehearse my own melody a few minutes later.

Whenever I needed to, I used that particular room, which was in the corridors on the way to various courses. Evidently, it was a strategy to find the girl who tormented me so much in my memories—the girl I needed to find, for some reason that I had surely forgotten.

I started the first note of the melody, getting it wrong, as usual. I started again. I had to restart the process about four times until I finally got almost halfway through without going out of tune once. My cell phone beeped for a few seconds, indicating a direct notification, probably forwarded to everyone. College parties are usually a freshman's interest, but once you get past the first one, you realize that there's nothing cool about it and that, in fact, it's all the same, every time. The encounter in Post Alley again—I mean, I didn't know it yet, I was a recent transfer, but as a supposed freshman, it wouldn't be a bad idea to try to get out of the house and not have to care about the games in my mind.

"Excuse me," said a female voice. "May I come in?" she asked, subtly opening the door, where her simple blonde hair made its presence felt.

"Yes, of course," I replied, almost dropping my violin bow. "Hi," I replied awkwardly. It was the girl from the other day—definitely the girl whose name I couldn't remember.

"I hope I'm not disturbing your music," she worried.

"It's not mine, I mean, I don't know, it's confusing, it just comes into my mind with a frequency that I can't ignore or forget," I blurted out as if I could trust her with my whole life.

"Wow, that was a bit deep," she laughed, discreetly, seemingly as comfortable as I was. "I'm Heather Mathis, psychology. And you?" she asked me, holding out her hand. My mind spun, and I flashed back to the night before, remembering having written her name on the blank piece of paper in the morning. A few flashbacks of other days flashed by, and my writing with her name appeared every time. I blinked and noticed her hand outstretched, waiting for me to greet her, with a huge question mark on her face.

"I'm sorry. I'm Alfie Walkers. Music," I replied, finally touching her hand. It was soft, like cotton, like snow. I felt a sharp thump in my chest, something very icy, and several flashes of snow in front of me, as if I had been transported somewhere else. I felt completely cold and icy and began to shiver, my eyes did the same. As I blinked, sometimes I saw the girl, sometimes I saw snow, and sometimes I saw a car. I felt my body fall off the chair and heard the sound of the violin hitting the floor, as well as my almost rigid body doing the same. I started shaking even more, as I continued to struggle and try to come back to reality. I felt someone touching me and shouting my name, but I couldn't make anything out. Suddenly, I saw a clear image of Heather approaching me, with her flowing hair running happily towards me, holding some paper that I couldn't read. She looked happy. Just as her image was approaching, I blinked and came back to reality, where the real Heather was shaking me and screaming for me.

"What happened?" I asked, confused. She helped me sit down but still showed clear expressions of concern on her face. Heather confirmed that I was shaking for a few minutes and that I kept blinking. She also said that she couldn't get up to call for help, she could only stand there trying to help me.

We finally calmed down. I took some water from the small bottle she offered me. It had been my first meeting with her, and I had already shown her my biggest problem. Although, for the first time, I was really scared.

"Maybe you should take it easy. Don't you think you might be working too hard?" she asked, still worried and making eye contact that I had no interest in deflecting. I didn't want to have to tell her about my strange difficulty of forgetting everything and thinking I was going crazy, so I agreed with her argument that possibly I was working too much. That would be depressing because even though I worked so hard, I was still a terrible violinist.

As soon as I could stand up without staggering, I picked up the violin and checked its condition. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that it hadn't been broken. "Do you want to go out today? People are going to Post Alley," she said. It's common for men to ask people out, so this took me by surprise. I said yes almost immediately, not that I needed to think about whether I'd have time or anything. I just needed to know that my mind wouldn't deprive me of it.

"I'd love to meet you there. What time?" I asked. Heather replied that she would probably be there by 7pm. I told her that I would definitely come, and then she left the room with a smile on her face. She closed the door with an even bigger smile. I quickly grabbed a sheet of paper to write down the time, but what was it again?