Why now?

November day. The UK was headed for a recession and a new Prime Minister had been appointed just two weeks before. It was also the day that the package came. I was outside checking on what was left of my plants when I heard a whirring sound.

A drone descended from the sky. It did so in a diagonal fashion. It was a larger than average drone, but it still resembled a children’s drone. It made a whirring noise that seemed to get bigger as it approached me. What was beneath the package was a large box. It was wrapped in string that was attached to the drone. It seemed odd that such a large box could be carried by a smaller drone. Then again ants carry weight twenty times their body weight I thought to myself.

When it reached nearer to the ground. It stopped. The box landed on my doorstep, exactly covering my doormat. It was almost as if the box was the exact same size as my doormat. It must not have been heavy as when it touched the ground it didn’t make any noise. There was a cutting noise and I realised that the drone had cut off the string. The string dropped to the floor whilst the drone took off. It went vertically this time and then sped off horizontally.

I was too surprised by this incident to do anything. I have never ever been delivered anything by drone before. I wondered if it was from Amazon. No Amazon only delivered via the door I told myself. I cautiously approached the package.

Maybe it was a prank? I thought to myself. In my life I had known three pranksters. Lucien, Brook, and Arvind. They were in different forms at my old secondary school. They all had been expelled on the same day. April fools’ day 2006 when they put stink bombs in the school’s toilet. It was also the last day of school before Easter Break. In which case I probably shouldn’t get too close to this package. It could be a stink bomb.

Or maybe…could it be a real bomb? Maybe it was a terrorist attack? The thoughts changed. I remembered the terrorist attack of Thursday the 7th July 2005 bombings. My school had been closed earlier that day and the London tubes were suspended. It was a period of national mourning and hysteria. I was only eleven years old and didn’t understand anything. However, that day was the first in a series of terrorist attack that rocked Britain.

How do I know so much detail? Its because I have an eidetic memory. Your normal people don’t capture the full picture, but I do. I see everything. I record everything. You might see a field with a horse in it and remember that you saw a field with a horse in it, but I remember the horse’s breed, colour and how many cracks there were on the saddle that day at the exact minute , second, hour, day , month, and year it was. Also, what I had for dinner that day.

The box was about the size of a small TV in height, width, and length. It didn’t have any labels or logos. It was just a box. The one thing it did have however was a message on the top. It was written on the top of the box in big bold clear handwriting and in black ink.

FORGET ME

It took me exactly 20 seconds to let it sink in. The length of some radio commercials. Forget me? It isn’t possible for me to scientifically forget, but also who exactly am I meant to forget? Or what? When? Why? How?

I stood there and waited to scan my memories for who or what would like me to forget them. There were a few contenders. I didn’t have a relationship, so this wasn’t an eternal sunshine of the spotless mind scenario. Only two individuals really stood out.

The first was my ex English teacher in Year Nine. Mr. Brogan. He was tall, well built and had brown hair and glasses. Apparently, he was a witness to the muggings in my local park. This was when I weas in Year Eight, so I didn’t have him yet. He once made fun of a student who had wet his pants on the 17th of October 2006. He encouraged the rest of the class to laugh at him.

He was a horrible, horrible teacher. He would criticise everything that the students did. No one scored above a B in his class. He would even literally scratch the whiteboard with his nails to get the children’s attention. On Monday the 20th of November 2006 he shouted at the students for no reason at all. He personally had it for me. He called me by my worst nickname. He criticised me even though I loved English class.

For homework to be given in on the 27th of November 2006 , the following Monday he made everyone write a story with a monster in it. I wrote about him. I was distributing the story at lunchtime when he caught me. He looked at me and said that I will teach you a lesson that you will never forget. His voice was menacing, and his blue shirt had crinkles on it that day.

This was scary as someone with an eidetic memory. And what was scarier was that he didn’t ever even report me to anyone. It was just the suspense that any minute now he will give me scars that I will never recover from. And yet he never acted on it. He knew that the suspense was my punishment. A few weeks later just before Christmas break, I told my parents. They were furious and they went to the headteacher Mr. Turner. My mum broke down. Mr. Brogan was removed and soon we had a new teacher after the Christmas break.

On Sunday the 25th of September 2011 I came across a Facebook post that would change my mind. It was the same day that an Everest tour plane crash in Nepal kills 19, including 2 Americans.

My friend Rohit had hacked into Mr. Brogan’s account and found some unnerving things. It turns out that he was a victim of child sex abuse as a kid. That explained his behaviour. I felt so bad for having judged him. He was a horrible person. Maybe there was a reason why though.

But why would he send me a message via a drone in a box that from its appearance looked hollow? Did he want me to forget that I had got him fired? It made no sense.

The next person was my psychologist who I first met when I was nine. My rabbit Knuckles had died. He was truly my best-est friend in the whole world. He was a giant rabbit too, as big as a large dog! He lived in a room all to himself next door to mine.

I cried and cried, and I miss him to this very day, but I knew a dead rabbit couldn’t write. My psychologist was a lady called Ms. Jacobs who was very patient with me. She was blonde, and green eyed and a nose piercing.

She tried very hard to get me to open. Our first session was on Monday the 17th of February 2003. The world had just had massive anti-war protests the last Saturday. She tried to ask me questions about if I knew about life after death. She asked me if I could ever imagine a life when I didn’t miss Knuckles. That was too painful. I miss him every single day, even now.

I said I did and made up a story about a poltergeist called Evil Style. She thought that I must be delusional and that I was processing the loss of my rabbit through the story. So, I decided to teach her a lesson.

I hit her.

Yes, I hit my psychologist. I hit her hard. She screamed. My parents came running in. They saw her on the floor with a bruise.

The next day she quit the profession and my parents told me that she sought counselling.

So yes, I made my psychologist see a psychiatrist.

Years later my parents told me that she had been a victim of domestic violence and that she had gone into counselling to help people with the same experiences. I had brought out her past repressed memories.

Now back it the present , I gave it a lot of thought. That sent a shudder down my spine. She spent years coming to terms with her own trauma and then she buried it. I unleashed her past suffering via the assault. If I had been domestically abused, I would be reliving the same memories every day . I would have become a psychopath. And here I was a buy of nine who had prevented a kind and empathetic woman from advancing in her career and changing the lives of others.

Both these people were complex characters. But why now, fifteen years apart would they send me a box with that message. I had lived with my consequences all my life. But why now?

I stood there exhausted by all my scanning of my memories when suddenly I heard the exact same whirring I had earlier that day. I looked up and saw the exact same drone in the sky. However, it was behaving erratically. It was circling around. Well, no not circling. It was making undiscovered shapes in the sky. I was distracted and kept concentrating on the sky when suddenly I saw a young man maybe my age or younger run up to my house.

He was puffing and panting . He had reddish brown hair and was wearing an Abercrombie shirt and long jeans that were tucked into his socks. He put his hands on his knees and let out a huge sigh.

He looked at me and pointed to the box. “Are you 14 Bakers’ Avenue?” he asked in between pants.

Suddenly it all made sense to me. “No” I began “This is 14 Barkers’ Avenue”.

The man went up to the box and picked it up. It was like I suspected hollow.

“It was meant to be for my ex-girlfriend” he said still panting. “I asked her to follow me, and it was meant to be empty like our relationship”. He took off.

With that cleared up I went inside and resumed my normal life. Or as normal as it could be.