WolfieJimi - Do I know you?

6:30am. Alarm blares the same song as always. The clock came with it preprogrammed. He never got around to changing it. Or learning it’s name. He hits snooze.

Get up. Shower. Get dressed. Grey uniform, gold gone. Replaced. Retired. The Admiral’s pips sit heavy on his shoulders. Comb hair. Avoid mirror.  Eat breakfast. Toast, no butter. Black coffee. He’s lost weight. He hasn’t noticed. 

Pull on coat. Put on shoes. Say goodbye to - no, she doesn’t live here anymore, does she. She hasn’t been here for months. She never really was. No matter. 

Step once more into the sunny streets of San Francisco. Another beautiful morning he must force himself to appreciate. Another cloudless sky. Another chorus of songbirds. Another pleasant walk to work. Another moment he has to remind himself that life is good and that he is happy. 

“Life is good. I am happy.” 

He takes a breath.

Stepping purposefully down onto the pavement, he keeps his eyes downcast. Expression downcast. Mind downcast. 

Life is good. He is happy.

The street is already beginning to bustle. Nameless faces hurry past, blank, unseeing, unseen, unremarkable, unremarked upon. He moves with them, striding swiftly, weaving and dipping past the multitude of other bodies surrounding him. He is just another one of the crowd. 

He’s in a hurry. He’s always in a hurry. Always busy. No time to stop. No time to pause. He doesn’t even have time to think. He tries not to have time to think. 

A woman with a pram blocks the way. He bumps into her, and sighs in irritation, not looking at her face. He tries to move around her, but the stream of people flooding in the other direction is unrelenting. He looks up.

A hat, pulled down over black hair, ears covered. A flash of dark eyes, of pale skin. A brown pin-striped suit on a tall, lean frame...

Sucker-punch, straight to the gut. Straight the the heart. He had forgotten he had one. 

Mind overcome by memories long avoided, judgement overridden by desperation, he reaches out and grabs the arm of the dark-eyed man in the suit, tightly, too tightly.

“Do I know you?” 

The man turns, and casts a cold glare at the breathless, middle aged, gaunt figure clutching at his expensive jacket with sweating palms and a constrictor’s grip.

And Jim Kirk looks up into the face of a stranger. Upturned nose. Freckles. Green eyes. Full cheeks. Full brows. Empty stare.

Nothing like him. 

“Sorry... I… thought you were… someone else...”

The man pulls away, moves on, dissolving back into the throng, just another stranger, another face in the crowd; not him, never him, how could it be him? 

Illogical.

And Jim Kirk stands in the street, a solitary island in the stream, as the world rushes by him in a blur, fading greyly, half-awoken, as if belonging to a dulled dream, as distant as it is present. 

Just as his life has been for the past two years, three months, and fifteen days.