pt 1: https://yesterdaywastomorrow.com/2025/05/10/hate/
I laid there for a time. Catching my breath, trying to understand, hoping an idea of what to do next would come to me. Maybe someone would finally find me and I would’t be responsible to figure out what should happen next.
“Don’t do it” I had shouted, but I truly didn’t know what ‘it’ was. After Nathan had vanished, the figure returned to the light and the chamber closed.
It must’ve been hours I laid there, waiting for salvation. Thirst ached within me and my stomach begged for sustenance, and they urged me to act. Pushing myself onto my hands and knees, I began the slog of a crawl to the entrance.
Every inch hurt, the beating I had taken before the capture left me all shades of blue and purple. The door felt like it was getting further and further away as I crawled, and eventually I noticed I would be passing the control interface for the hatch that Nathan had opened.
Curiosity, well it killed the cat, and at this point I’m pretty close myself. As I crawled closer, I wondered what he had intended to do. What was on the other side of the hatch? He had seemed so driven to use it, but I had never heard him say why or what it even did.
It was closer now, the silver chromed podium pierced into the air above me. It seemed to go on forever, adorned in a golden glow. I realized that I was crawling toward it, my mind had decided it was worth the detour, hunger and thirst could wait.
My body groaned as I pushed myself into a kneeling position in front of the podium, the golden top even with my eyes. It was ornate, a piece of the past. Why was this here? What was this room and what was the hatch?
My hands gripped the sides and I tried pulling myself to stand in front of it in hopes that would make it make more sense to my eyes. My knee gave out half-way up and I feel back to eye-level with the golden crown.
I took a breath, and tried again getting a better grip. As I brought myself up the same knee tried to give out and in the moment I shuffled my weight and grip on the podium to push myself up. My right hand flat on the top as I pushed up, I could feel it’s warmth.
I checked around me once again, for some reason I felt like I shouldn’t be doing this. As my eyes were on the entrance on the otherside of this vaulted chamber, a loud sound clanged from the side of the room the hatch had opened.
“Uh” I vocalized knowing something I didn’t want to happen was already in progress.
“No no no, stop, undo” I hurriedly chanted commands as I searched the top of the podium for some sort of controls to reverse the movement of the hatch. It was a golden tablet set into the chrome podium, a writing across it was a language I couldn’t read. There were no controls, no buttons, no levels or knobs. It was like an ancient tablet unearthed by archeologists had been stuck into a spaceship control panel.
The hatch kept opening, slow and steady the rooms luminance growing as it did. Each moment seemed longer than the last. I wasn’t sure whether to hide from the figure on the otherside of the hatch. I couldn’t run, so I guess I was just going to have to deal with it head on. I just wish it would stop opening and close.
The light pulsed, and the only thought going through my head was what I was going to say. Nathan had seemed to talk to this thing whatever it was, what was it going to say? Would it be angry, upset, terrifying? As I thought about this, I noticed the hatch had ceased opening.
In fact it was closing, the light growing dim.
Confused, I looked around again. Was there another control panel, another tablet that someone else had used to close it?
“Hello?” I shouted weakly, coughing a bit from the effort. No one replied but the echo of my hello, which for a brief second made me jump. Turning around I watched the hatch close with a loud thud that rumbled the whole chamber followed by the silence once again.
Standing there for several moments, curiosity once again winding up to kill the cat, I weigh’d my options, continue what would eventually end up being a crawl due to my remaining strength or….or open the hatch and confront the growing feeling of regret I had in the pit of my stomach.
The hatch weighed on my vision, drawing me to look at it even if i resisted. I looked back to the tablet, wondering what I needed to do to open. Searching all of it for meaning, something that made sense I tried reading it like a book. The words, if thats what they were, weren’t letters I knew how to pronounce. My eyes danced over them hoping for something that would connect itself to the hatch, a word that seemed like it could make sense of the mystery before me, a symbol that looked like a stick-figure exiting a door, anything that would get that hatch back to opening.
Memory kicked back to me, and the moment of pulling myself to the podium urged me to place my palm on the center of the tablet. I looked at my palm, before placing it on the tablet, I guess one last look in case I never saw it again.
CLANK
the hatch had started to move. The big walls of concrete slowly sliding their way to the recesses they called a vacation home. A beam of light shone across the floor, presenting it’s progress inch by inch across the length of the chamber. The uneasy feeling in my stomach grew slightly as it widened.
Blinded by the light, I couldn’t help but start to move myself toward it. Podium blocking my progress, I side stepped it and felt my feet fumbling for their footing under my weight.
I couldn’t see the sphere, the light was burning into my retinas but I kept staring. I struggled to breath, noticing for the first time in a bit how dry my throat was. Brought back to my mind, hungry pained me again and I just wished the pain, hungry and thirst would go away so I could focus on the giant looming anxiety ridden ball of light that faced me.
A pulse of light pushed its way across the chamber. I continued my steps toward it, unsure if I was truly in control of my legs. The hatch had almost finished opening it’s door and I stood up straight prepared to face my fate. The pain had subsided, I guessed because of the existential threat that was surely walking toward me in the brightness.
“What are you?” I shouted into the full. I still didn’t see it or them or whatever it was.
From the blinding light something emerged. A silhouette stood in front of me and for a second my eyes adjusted before trying to readjust. Closing my eyes and opening them in hopes they would wipe this vision away, I took in what looked to be…me.
I smiled back at me. “Does that answer your question?” he or it or me said.
“Uh, n-not really?” I stammered looking at my chest and back at the me that stood facing me.
He chuckled with a joy that even Santa Clause would be jealous of”You know what, honestly, I should’ve known that!”
In front of my eyes he changed again, to Santa Clause. “Is that better?” he widened his arms as if to present himself to me, spinning in place so I could look at the outfit that adorned his figure.
“Sorta, but it-it still doesn’t answer my question” I gulped mid-sentence the power of this individual had become apparent.
“Hah! Humans, always questioning, always wishing for more. Take a guess, what do you got?” He roared with an amusement of someone talking of children playing.
I took a minute. This was a lot and he was staring at me expectantly waiting for a reply.
I formed a sentence slowly, weighing the words as much as I could “Well, I don’t think you’re Santa”
“Aw, you’re no fun” he said in a fake disappointment and changed into something new. There in front of me, stood the easterbunny. A big mascot outfit, complete with what looked to be a removable head. “Take another guess!” he shouted, muffled by the fake bunny head.
“Are you some sort of demon?”
He changed again, this time into Steve Harvey from Family Fued. “Survey Says!” and he spun around to point at an invisible screen before the sound of an error buzzer filled the chamber.
“Wrong answer number one, would you like to go for double or nothing?” He sounded somber, like he was a host worried I wouldn’t take away some grand prize of some fake show.
Frustrated by everything “I don’t understand, what is happening?”
He turned into the form I had seen before, a blurry shadow standing in front of me.
“There is that better? Doesn’t really answer your question but whatever” he said, the tone like I taken his fun away.
“What did you do to Nathan?” I asked, my fate suddenly pressuring my mind to know what would happen.
I could tell the blur was shaking it’s head. “That guy was a jerk, were you with him?”
“no, no no. He had me tied up over there”
“Yea I was wondering what that was all about, do you want me to bring him back?”
“Not really”
“ok good because that guy sucked. And now you got one more.”
Puzzled, my brow furrowed and I was confused on his meaning.
“Oh you still haven’t figured out the first question”
I was lost for words, whatever this thing was it was toying with me. It was better than me in every way and I was the meal it was playing with before it ate me.
“Why are you here?” I finally pushed something out of my brain in hopes to keep this moment from ending, the whateveritis from getting bored.
“That is a hard question to answer, how much time do you have?” looking at a blurry wrist.
I looked down at my bloody clothes that hide the wounds and bruises beneath them.
“You’ll be alright that was number 2.” He said quickly before moving onto what I could tell was a heavily rehearsed speech.
“When life finds it’s way into the halls of gods, they seek answers and they demand hope. Gods then, do not wish to be subjected to whining of mortals, so they create me, the host of hope. The gifted giver. A force meant to answer prayers, facilitate dreams, and in some cases cause chaos. I have no sense of good or evil, love or hate, i just am. I was given as a gift to humanity, to be used by the leaders of men. Humans, unsatisfied with this arrangement lusted after my power, they sought to understand and reproduce the magnificence of the gods. Lies, stealing, killing all in the name of hope. What then when I am taken from the hands of the holder? What then shall I do when I am locked away and not giving a chance to help. You have come to know me by many names, but the one you know best is…”
“…you’re a genie?” I cut him off, my mind finally putting the pieces together.
“You couldn’t let me get there?” He said with an attitude of disappoint at not being able to complete his monologue.
“You said that was number 2, what did that mean?”
“Oh so you’re just gonna blow past all the exposition? sure have it your way, yea number two you wish for ‘ the pain, hungry and thirst would go away’ and…?” He was motioning at me like I was supposed to do something. My hands moved toward my chest, and i felt the places bruises had been. The placed Nathan had kicked repeatedly, where he had slammed the metal bar against my side. No pain filled me with burning, no hunger begged for scraps and thirst no longer plagued my throat, it was true.
“and number 1?” I asked.
” ‘I wish it would stop opening and close’ ” he said in a tone that was a bit higher pitched like he was mocking me but not in a rude way.
“Seems kinda pointless now” I muttered.
Chuckling he chimed, “Yea, thought that was a weird one, but you asked and delivered!”
“So I get three?” I asked trying to understand the rules.
“Well I’ll be, someone knows the rules! Yes you get a third wish and then *he whistled while making some hand motion back to the bright sphere* it’s back in the bottle I go”
I struggled to think of a wish, this was what all those birthday cake candles were practice for and now I can’t escape the fact that I would always pretend to wish and then blow them out, “I …. I don’t know”
“Oh come on! There has to be something, money and power are pretty popular.”
I thought for a moment, if power can attain money and money can buy power, which one wins? I thought back to my childhood, and those birthday cakes. Why hadn’t I wished? Was it the simple fact that I didn’t believe in wishes, despite the fact I am face to face with a wish-granter now?
If I had wanted something as a kid, would those wishes have come true? If I wished for a toy firetruck would that have magically appeared in the middle of the cake?
“A firetruck, you got it!” He bellowed started the motion to snap his fingers.
“Wait” I realized he was granting a wish I didn’t want.
His fingers snapped, and there in front of me was my childhood kitchen table with a cake that’s candles had been crushed under the weight of a toy firetruck.
“I didn’t wish for that!” I pleaded holding out my hands in a motion to let him know I meant the firetruck in the cake on the table in the empty chamber that he and I occupied.
“Kinda sounded like you did” he said in an earnest tone trying to convince me that I was out of wishes.
“No, I was contemplating my childhood birthdays and why I didn’t ever wish for anything!”
He became my mother.
“You didn’t wish! Jamison you should be wishing for things or they won’t come true” he had nailed her mannerisms and tone. Her death a decade before brought up a well of emotions as I fell to my knees before her.
“Mom?”
“Oh, bad choice” he said in his blurred voice and shifted back “My bad, should’ve read the room”
It took me several minutes to collect myself, when I looked up finally wiping the tears from my eyes he was sitting with his feet up holding cake and I assumed eating it but the blurred form made it hard to tell what was happening when the cake crossed into the blurred form. “Cakes not half bad, once you dig the firetruck out of it.”
He looked at me, still a mess from the brief confrontation with the ghost from my past.
“Ok, listen my bad on the whole mom thing. It was obviously a sore subject and in an effort to make it up to you I’ll refund you the wish for the door closing.” he said in-between bites of cake.
“So what does that mean?” I asked still not liking the game that I was apart of for this higher power.
He threw the cake down and shot up, to his blurry feet “It means you got one more wish man! Come on, let me hear it! What do you want?”
I searched within myself, what do I want. It’s a hard question that has been asked to the id for as long as man had ego. My eyes darted from side to side as I weighed my options. Money, power, anything I could ever dream. None of it meant anything in that moment.
“I wish I was home”
