Firewall

Lately I've been having flashbacks and weird dreams of scenes from my past. It all started two weeks ago with a Samoan BBQ and a boy named Goce. I spotted him quickly, frail and pasty white against the crowd. But it wasn't because he looked out of place that made me do the double take. Where did I know him from...?

A bottle of red later my friend Cassie and I were coming back from my car with another when I saw him again standing around in front of the house. This time he stared right back at me. "Anne?"

And there it was, the first of a series of flashbacks to come. I saw a spiky blonde-tipped 'do with a mean red streak at the back that belonged to the 19-year-old me. I was pinning on a tag - Anne Santos, Customer Service Leader - on my bright blue shirt. Sitting on an upside down crate sucking on probably my 10th cigarette that day and that same voice, "Anne" made me turn to face him.

"Goce!" I hugged him like it was '06 again, working at KFC in Footscray. We reminisced and swapped stories that day, I reminded him of his obsession with Spongebob Squarepants and how he was my best employee and he reminded me of Akon's Moonshine I couldn't get enough of, blaring on repeat, getting the whole staff to groove to it whenever it wasn't busy. I remember Roula telling me stories about her love life, Russell, the Cook's jokes, my pants splitting at the crotch when I bent down to carry the chicken trays and Yasmin's squeaky laugh. The list was endless.

It's strange. Whenever I thought about my time at the Footscray store I always did so with distaste. All I could remember was the stress I went through juggling university and being a manager-in-training, getting lectured and shifts cut by that witch of a co-worker, Rebecca and receiving a 56% on my review that got all the branch managers nudging and whispering about me. Ugh.

I didn't realise until I saw Goce that day how much I'd almost forgotten about my past. The good stuff that should have stayed with me. It's all coming back now, not just from my teenage years but earlier too. It was as if Goce had tapped into the firewall that suppressed my happier memories. Makes me go hmmmm, life was good after all.