Finding Joy

Alexei slowly opens her eyes, woken by the suns’ soft glow beginning to spread into her chamber. She used to wake up and bounce from bed, ready for all the day had to offer. It had been so long since those days, she hardly felt they had ever been real. Now there was no reason to bound, she felt no drive to rise. All of her days were spent the same, constantly focused on survival. She blinks her eyes and lets the fretting of the morning birds sing her back to sleep.

As she fades off, still enveloped in the warmth of the nights’ sleep, she pushes away the invading fog of memories. It is a constant whisper from the shadows of her consciousness. She relives the past enough in her dreams, she does not need to give it any more of her present. Her recollections all feel like dreams anyway. In those rare moments where the world is too quiet to stave off the yearning of her heart to dwell, the remembrances seem so foreign to her current life she fears she has wished them into memories.

The sun is higher as she wakes again, streaming in through the cracks in her nightly concealment barrier. She rolls onto her back and stretches. Sometimes it pays to be short, and in this case she can stretch fully within the width of the trees’ chamber where she sleeps. There are moments where she has taught herself to find joy and appreciate her current situation. Dry, sunny mornings are one of those times. She has adapted to many living situations since the before time. That is what she calls her old life, nondescript and without emotion, just the before time. She has come to terms with the fact that her old self died. She had grieved for the old Alexei, so naïve and carefree. But thinking of the old Alexei would be dwelling, and so she leaves her in the before time.

This is her favorite area, along the western coast among the tall redwoods. She’s returned here many times, mostly in summers. This forest has a lighter feeling, and she finds comfort in the fact that she’s around other living things that were here in the before time. One of the few memories she allows herself is of her family as a child hiking through redwoods just like these. She couldn’t be sure it was the same forest, but it gave her the same feeling of warmth, love and protection. That’s where she has to stop the memory; any more and the warmth and love turn to longing and loneliness.

The last time she’d been in this area the government cleaners had gotten too close. She fled east and stayed away for a couple of years. She’d only been back for a week, in the safe haven she’d slept in many times within the base of one of the majestic redwoods who felt like friends. She hoped to stay here for some time, at least until the chill of winter would push her further south.

She gives thanks to the tree for giving her shelter and warmth for another night and sits up, running through her food inventory in her head. She’d put together a pretty good stockpile throughout the week. Alexei was adept at finding ways into the rows upon rows of empty houses. It was imperative that she not leave any sign that she had been there, so she couldn’t just break a window or bust down a door. She was nervous that perhaps the government cleaners had put trackers in the homes, but she hasn’t seen any signs of them in the last week.

Alexei is anxious to visit her stashes. The only thing to do in this life is continue ensuring survival, so she has areas across the west coast where she can hide. She never stays in the same place for too long and travels light, restocking from the resources left behind in the abandoned homes. On occasion she finds herself drawn to objects and unable to leave them behind. In each of her locations she has hidden stashes of things she has found in people’s homes. There is no rhyme or reason, no pattern to the items. There are pictures, books, coins, jewelry, children’s toys; an array of objects lost by their owners who had at one point cherished them. Alexei felt compelled to collect these things, almost as if she needed to treasure them to make up for the loss the world had experienced. She has enough food squirreled away for now and feels comfortable enough in the immediate area that she decides to spend today checking on them.

Alexei deconstructs the barrier she places in front of the tree each night for protection and puts on her backpack. Large and green with little embellishment, it is always either on her or within reach, fully packed and ready for her to run at a moments’ notice. The first stash is only about a mile away and she covers that quickly. Alexei needs to be able to run long distances in an emergency, and she treks out daily to make sure she keeps up her endurance. She can easily hike tens of miles in a day.

She keeps her ears out for foreign sounds. She doesn’t want to draw attention to herself and is adept at walking stealthily, but she also doesn’t want to surprise a bear out for a summer stroll. She keeps a machete in her hand just in case, though she knows it will be relatively ineffective against a grizzly protecting her cubs. She’s also listening for the telltale sounds of government planes.

When she reaches the familiar bolder at the edge of a small clearing, she veers right. About 50 paces up ahead she spots the bright balloon flashing in the summer sunlight. Its deflated carcass is stuck in a tree about 30 feet up, and thankfully for her it never moves. Branches at the base of the tree craftily hide a medium sized cooler. She had painted the cooler green to help it blend in. She moves all of the debris and cracks open the lid of the cooler. Inside is a further array of plastic. There are books in ziplock bags, small tupperware containers with odds and ends, and various other collected treasures.

She lifts out the books one by one, her heart leaping as she sees the familiar covers. She hasn’t seen these books in at least 2 years. She pulls out a book of bedtime stories, the same ones she had read with her parents when she was little in the before time, still dog-eared to her favorite pictures. Alexei had stashed these just before leaving on her own for the first time, unsure when she would return. The nostalgia they bring back is dizzying. She puts the bedtime stories in her backpack, and places the rest back in the container for later. She pulls out another ziplock bag from the cooler, this one full of small toys. Some are puzzles, others just little spinners made of metal. She spins one between her fingers and watches the metal reflecting the sunlight streaming through the tree leaves. She also puts this in her bag, but will need to pull something else out. She has a rule that her trinkets and books can’t take up more than 25% of the space in her backpack. The space is fundamental for essentials in case she ever must run.

She sits there for some time, going through each item. There is a picture of a family that she had taken when she raided their house for food. The house was beautiful, tucked away in the woods. It had a beautiful porch with 2 rockers still on it, just waiting for their owners to return and rest upon the worn wood. The foliage was a bit overgrown, invading onto the house by the time she happened upon it. But she could see how majestic it had once been. Inside she found a simple framed photo, of a family of 4 standing on the porch stairs, the rockers visible in the background. A mother and father, and a boy and girl of about 10. She pictures them as twins, even though she really didn’t know. A snapshot of a moment in time. Their hands were full of party-going materials, the girl holding a present, the boy a bag his mother had given him to carry. The father has a coffee cup and keys, and the mother is holding a casserole dish. Someone stopped them for a quick picture, all smiles, on their way to what she imagines was a joyous party. She remembers taking the photo out of the frame and hiding the frame in a closet so its emptiness would not leave a sign that she had been here.

As she gets to the bottom of the cooler, past more books on identifying animals and plants that were long-studied, a harmonica taken from a placed dubbed “The Rock and Roll Ranch” that she had wished she could have visited in its hey-day, a few stuffed animals, and a bottle of perfume, she finds the jewelry box. She winds the key and opens the lid, the box emitting soft mellifluous notes intermixing with the sounds of the forest. It is the familiar melody of You Are My Sunshine, and Alexei quietly hums along as she picks through the pieces in the box. A bright emerald green pin in the shape of a turtle is on top. There is also a watch that is too pretty to be handy, but she loves to stare at the hands as they tick, constantly moving time forward. The watch is charged through sunlight, and the small galaxy of crusty diamonds that are sprayed across the façade glitter when they catch the rays just right.

Underneath the watch is a simple golden heart-shaped locket. She had forgotten about this. She remembers finding it in a home that had looked like her old home, which she had ventured into not long after she was on her own. It was in a child’s bedroom and seemed out of place due to its size, about that of a quarter. The locket has some weight to it and is set on a heavy gold chain. When opened there are photos of a man and a woman, young though the photos are aged. She had taken it that day because the woman’s smile intrigued her. It seemed to somehow convey confidence, a confidence that at the time Alexei didn’t feel but was desperately imitating. The man’s smile seemed sad, and she remembers often staring at the open locket wondering about their life.

The sun had crossed overhead as she reminisced with her beloved treasures. She pulls out a book on travel from her backpack and places it in a bag within the cooler. She packs up all of the items and works to again conceal the cooler containing her cache. She slips the heart-shaped locket over her head and dons her backpack. It’s time to make her way back for some lunch, before mapping out her next house hunting route. She knows it will only get harder to evade the government cleaning squads as they begin completion of phase 1, and she has to focus on building stock for her long-term survival.