It was the first of the month, and summer had just begun.
Of course, not the actual summer. She was living in a bastardized version of her favorite season, the heat wrapping its tendrils around her organs and pulling tight, just on the bad side of uncomfortable.
She loved it.
~~~
It was the first of the month, and perhaps the most important day of the month. Her eyes flickered back and forth across the patchy expanse of her thighs. She traced the edges of what made her whole, her fingers dancing upon the continents created until her breath hitched and the borders burned in the back of her eyes. Her lids lowered, and tears ran, and in that moment she escaped from the world she found herself trapped within.
A knock sounded on the door, and her passport expired.
~~~
Lots of people were at her house that day, and she knew them all.
Well, not all. Most of them. But truly, she knew them--they all experienced a collective need, a shared trait, if you will. They all felt the need to escape, and she provided that for them.
"Sweetie," her parents told her, "we're just giving the people what they want. Who are we to deny them the right to live as freely as we do?"
She wasn't God, as her mother loved to remind them. "We are not the One Who Lives Above--our only job is to spread love."
And that they did--every first and fifteenth of every month.
This was love--of this she was sure.
~~~
They were upset.
Of course, they didn't say as much--but she knew. Her mom had a habit of twisting her rings as she reconciled guilt, the tan around her fingers much more subtle than they should have been after 27 years of marriage.
Her father was stoic as always, his hands wrapped around each other like the Betende Hände in eternal prayer, his eyes unseeing in the same way that her heart danced for mercy everyday.
That day they said hello, and once again said goodbye, and she was alone.
~~~
In the night, when the faces that she knew started to disappeared, her parents sent her upstairs to change.
As the sun left the sky with a painful goodbye, her body was used as a recruitment tool to promote every bad decision one could make in good conscience--a twist of the hips placed upon a drunken escapade had never seemed so sweet.
In the night her name was no longer hers, but more a collection of masks she could wear at any moment. She was yours for the moment, and then she was not.
This, she knew, was not love, and had known this.
But her parents always brought her cookies and orange juice and ibuprofen afterwards, and she knew that love was not always seen, but felt.
~~~
She had watched the sun rise one thousand times in her lifetime, of this she was sure.
This, of course, was an underestimation as she had been in her room longer than 2.73785079 years, and would continue to be in her room for much longer than that.
The last time she had went outside it was cold, and damp, and her body swelled up into patches and marks and no longer could she catch snowflakes on her tongue.
Today was the first day of summer.
~~
Her family was in the illegal business of bringing people happiness, she said.
YOU ARE READING
African Violets and the Search for Pale Gold
Teen Fiction"this was fucking love," she thought. she knew it was love in the same way her father could make smoke turn into hearts and blow them into her mother's face, or how her mother could make even the sharpest corners of their lives turn soft. this was l...
