The Daily Doodles

“The Lost Year”

Ivy Wang’s brain starts to feel fuzzy, as if it’s floating and looking down at herself from above, and the tingles of deja vu creep in behind her tired eyeballs. She has done this before— walked down this same hallway overlooking the planet her father (and many others) are mining tripolodene on, just as the chimes announced that it was officially a New Year back on Earth…

Each step feels the same, each moment of the memory seems so familiar… was it in a dream…?

No… that’d be silly.

She remembers that at this moment a year ago, she was headed to the same classroom in the Orange Wing, with the same teacher, the same expected classmates, walking alone as always, running late like usual, the familiar warm glow reflecting from the rocky planet below, and the same annoying chimes making the redundant New Years announcement.

Ivy pauses as she realizes that an entire year has passed, but… nothing has changed. She’s doing the exact same thing she was doing a year ago, and all of the hopes and goals she imagined could and would take place this year… didn’t. It’s all the same.

The past year might as well have not even happened.

Ivy imagines hopefully that she actually just entered a popped bubble in time and was wormholed back to this exact moment so she could relive the year over again and make sure that something would happen, anything, a second chance to not let herself get in this rut… but she knows real life isn’t that cool.

She’s stuck with this lost year of nothingness.

When she gets to class, she tries to explain this empty feeling to the people she is forced to be friends with, but she can tell they all think (in a rather annoying know-it-all way) that she is talking about the 10 years they spent hibernating on the long distance space shuttle that took them to this stupid mining facility.  They don’t understand.

And no matter how many times Ivy slowly and simply explains to them that she knows what they think she’s saying, but she’s not saying that, Ivy sees that they think she is the one who isn’t “getting it” even though it’s her own damn story.  They just nod dismissively.

Overhearing only half of the quiet conversation as he was setting up the atomic projector, the teacher chimes in and condescendingly agrees with Ivy’s friends that Ivy simply must just be thinking of the long hibernation… we all felt that was lost time, Ivy, it’s very normal.  Don’t worry about it.

Stewing in her own frustration, Ivy vows to never have another year like this ever again.  And maybe to sabotage all of their hibernation tanks on the way back to Earth.

Posted 1/2/2013 

(Starring The Amazing Ivy Wang of authorsrobot.tumblr.com!)

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