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V
Alex put his head down and listened to a song.

He hadn't heard this song for several years.

It was a song from his youth.

It plays gently, with light piano and choir. Alex tries to send himself back.

In his memories, he is a child. He uses the internet everyday to talk to his friends through chatrooms.

His father is sick, lying on his bed for hours at a time. His father is having back problems and Alex helps him out when he can.

His house is different. He knows that the house he grew up in is different now, but he tries to imagine what it looked like then. Furniture in different places and a dim light in the house from the sun outside.

Alex isn't really too sure why he tried to picture this time in his life. It wasn't a significant period. He lived and his father was sick.

An adult now, Alex thought about his childhood quite a bit. Sometimes he had trouble going to sleep, because he would imagine that he was a younger man, but with the conscience that he had now.

He would have gotten so much farther and done much better for himself. He would surprise people with how much he knew about them. He would surprise everyone, because he would have lived longer than was physically possible. And he would treat the people he treated poorly as good as they should have been.

It kept him up at night, because he couldn't change what he had done before.
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VI
Randi walked to the office of his apartment. He was holding a form he had to fill out detailing why his garbage disposal has stopped working.

He wasn't nervous or upset about it. The disposal had broken two months ago. He was thinking about why he hadn't finished this form earlier so he'd have a working disposal now.

He had left his parents house two years ago, yet he still hadn't realized what it was like to have a problem and fix it right then and there.

He had known people who could do that. Somewhere inside of him, it existed to. That ability to take action and do.

He thought about a friend's father. His name was Henry and Henry was a mason. His hands were callous and he held strength. Henry would walk up to a hole in the wall and then get his plaster coating. He would see a leak in his car and investigate the cause. He would tell his son, whose name was Nick, to put up with the things he wasn't happy with.

Randi had a lot of things he needed to take care of. It came up on him and he was overwhelmed. It was easy to shrug it off until later.

He was moving soon and he had to finish his new apartment application. He needed to find a new job soon with this move and he hadn't filled out any applications yet. He had movies to return and goodbyes to say. He needed to start packing up his things and getting ready, but he wasn't ready.

He tossed the work form into the apartment office mail slot. "I finally got something taken care off."

He sighed contently as he walked back to his apartment. That wasn't so bad. It was so easy. And he felt so much better after that. The relief was terrific and he felt good. "I think, I'll take the day off."

As he laid around his place playing video games, those other responsibilities came to mind. "I already did something today. I did alright." is what he thought.