Changing Lives: Chapter 3
The bus stop is very far from Maria’s house. She continues riding the bus for half an hour, gets on a train heading towards the city, and finally gets on another bus going north for another half hour. It is around 5 p.m. when she arrives at her apartment. The rain has stopped, and golden rays of sunlight are streaming through the clouds.
Maria groans as she walks up the flight of stairs to her second-floor apartment. She remembers how her joints hurt less when she was Emily and in her early forties.
The keys jingle as Maria opens the door. One is for her apartment, one is for her gray Honda Civic that she hasn’t driven since losing her better pair of glasses, and one is for the storage room that keeps all of Mateo’s things.
Mateo.
Maria’s heart lurcheswhen she opens the door and sees the kitchen table that Mateo made her. His coffee cup is placed at the seat across from hers. Maria has washed it every day since he died.
Maria sits down beside that coffee cup, as she did every afternoon, and begins talking aloud. She sighs.
“I told you that I would be switching lives with someone today, and I did. But it did not happen as I expected. I am still… me. But I’m also Emily. And I have no idea where in the world the rest of me is.”
Maria shook her head. “I still have all of my memories. I still love you. I still miss you to no end. But I’m Emily. I also have… I also had a job as a claim director, a mom who couldn’t care less about me, and a big, empty apartment.”
Maria looks down at the coffee cup.
“And now I have a small, empty apartment.”
Maria’s stomach growls. She slowly moves to the fridge, opens it, and finds it empty. She remembers that she goes to the market every afternoon to chat with the cashiers. This afternoon she forgot to go because… well… she was busy switching bodies.
The spring evening was chilly. Maria goes back inside to grab another sweater and heads out to the market. It is only a five-minute walk, but Maria is tired.
This is one of the reasons I wanted to switch bodies, Maria remembers. She was hoping to have a younger, more energetic body. Maria hopes that she was able to switch with such a person.
That was just a small reason, though. The real reason, the same as Emily, was that Maria was hoping for friends, for true companionship.
Has my life improved at all from when I was Emily? Maria thinks.
The automatic doors slide open, and the young woman at the cash register smiles and waves. Her name is Ayesha, and she is a quiet university student studying biology. She lives with a roommate and two cats, and she has recently been learning to play tennis. Maria knows her well.
Maria also knows that Ayesha probably talks to her out of sympathy, but regardless, she enjoys the conversations. Ayesha is a nice girl.
Emily had a good friend in university whose name was also Ayesha. Her personality was quite different, but Emily missed their pizza parties and their trips to a different museum every month. Maria smiles.
“Mrs. Moreira, you have such a lovely smile,” Ayesha says warmly to Maria. “How was your day today?”
How to begin?
“Well… I went exploring today,” Maria replied. “To a small town about an hour outside of the city. There was… a famous hot spring there.”
“Good for you, Mrs. Moreira,” Ayesha says, as she turns to help a customer.
Maria finishes shopping and heads home to make dinner.
She eats alone.
She lights a candle and takes a long bath alone.
She goes to sleep at 10:30 p.m.
Has anything changed from when she was Emily?
Chapter 4>
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