In The Shadow Of The Storm

I  happened to rediscover this wonderfully odd story idea today. Typically I ended up working on it instead of my other novel, because ooh I love shiny, interesting things! Figured I would share a little bit of what I have so far on here. 

The Stranger

Something happened…

But none of them remember it. As I stand here and look in, a stranger on their isolated shores. I can almost see that blot at the back of their minds from my home at the broken lighthouse. Black, impenetrable, but invisible. Even though no one can really see it, it is most certainly there — that non-reminder. It teases their memories with faint anxieties, taunting them that they should know… something … but they don’t... they can’t. The reality is just beyond their reach and their desperate thoughts grasp on nothing. They are the forgotten, just like they have also forgotten.

It is in this blot of forgetting which Vivian lives. I remember that first day when little Vivian realized something was very wrong with her world. It was the day she met me-- long ago when we were children. Although she may have had inklings before then, I cannot tell. All I can tell is that she’s not like the others. From her point of view I was someone she had never met before and that alone was strange, unheard of, as everyone knew everyone on this forgotten island. The auspicious day of our meeting had not been accompanied by any portent of doom, or anything so obvious. Yet I experience such a dread now when I think back on it. They have no idea their forgetfulness is undoing it all. The horror within swells and roars now, back then it was just a haunting whisper, a what if…

What if everything just stopped someday and nothing happened, ever, ever again.

Mortal souls would scream at such oblivion-affirming thoughts, or even the notion that such emptiness can exist.

But back then they were just feelings, and the truth is feelings lie to us just as readily as people lie. They lie for good reason sometimes… to save our minds, or us… even though it hurts when the light finally comes, lashing the darkness with an unforgiving rage. 
  It hurts me to lie to her face everyday, I should leave but it hurts even more when I am away... and the world outside continues to die.   
So I continue to lie in love, hoping somehow to mend memory itself.
                          (Journal entry - Anonymous)