“I’m looking California and feeling Minnesota” ~ Chris Cornell

Lyllian sits in the bright cold corner of the office. The dull cubicle walls hide her eyes. The low hum of voices from faces she cannot see, doesn’t want to see. That morning she hurriedly brushed her teeth with her sleek brown cords half on and her red bra sporting a dark stain of splashing water the dawn of a new day pressing through the small bathroom window. Glancing sideways at the moving blue feed a face materializes by and fades away. Local boy and rock superstar front man Chris Cornell has been found dead at the age of 52. Lyllian’s toothbrush dangles from her half open mouth. What the fuck? Her mind numbs. Suddenly her chest hurts and she’s dropping to her knees next to the porcelain as a stream of burning vomit seers her throat. A few deep breaths later she leans back against the cool wall of the tiny bathroom an odd calm.

Her mind flashes back to October 1991. While all of Seattle was waking up from the hypnotic sleep of the mock guitar riffs and shallow vocals of the last decade of rock a new sound was emerging. Hurting, wrenching, raw. Dirty and real. Grunge was born and its Godfather? Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. To people like Lyllian anyway, small, rootless, and frizzy haired. A scribbler of meanings. It altered her. Redefined her. The scramble to find a place replaced by the creation of a place.

 And now, it was shrinking even as she skimmed the headline. Apparent death by suicide. The constant ding of emails wrenches her from her melancholy. There is laughter and the whine of a printer. The office continues to move and breathe and withstand.

Yesterday morning she’d had her annual wellness visit. It had gone swimmingly. Had she expected it not to? She had debated for roughly 20 seconds about telling her doctor about the strange dreams and, well, black outs is what you’d call them I suppose. The ones she had during her childhood and now, the ones she’d been having again recently. But in the end she had smiled tightly and exchanged pleasantries about the weather and some options for her never ending cough issue.

She sounded crazy. Ever she thought so. She had not told Michael yet either. What’s to tell? That she is having trouble sometimes remembering where she is or in places she’s never been? That sometimes she remembers things so vividly it can only be real? But how can it be? And that almost 30 year ago she’d found and lost a locket that was connected to her as surely as her mismatched ears and deep brown curls and that now, just 2 months ago the locket had simply appeared again in her hands as surely as if it had never left? What the hell was happening to her?

Next Chapter: Anya Moscow, 1922