Safety Pins

Saturday 6th November

Dear Noah,

    Cold smoke trickled from my throat as sunlight bled through lilac clouds.

    I was left stiff from hugging my knees all night. I stretched my arms up slowly, but was stopped short by the rough wooden roof of the tunnel I was slumping in. I looked up, taking in the cracked paint—once yellow; now, resembling a dirty vomit-beige—and my eyes were drawn to my hands, covered in streaks of dry mud; and to my wrist, where I could see the tip of a long gash streaming down to my elbow's crease.

    I crawled out of the tunnel, collapsing after an attempted two-footed position. My legs were shaky and my knees painful, but moving my muscles felt blissfully aberrant—my veins thawed and body woke in time with the sunrise. I'd have watched the star mount itself into the sky, but I'd seen more than my fair share of sunrises. They no longer held the majestic sense of a new day, because there were no new days—before you. There was only the same day, oozing into a continuous sludge of the weeks and months and years that had made up my life until then.

    Instead, I tried standing once more, shamefully pleased to find my legs were, once again, functioning in their correct manner. The cold metal bars of the park fence bit my fingers as I climbed over them. I shoved my hand into my pockets. The material was course against them.

    Aching trees surrounded the park, and they groaned to me and about me as I traversed their dappled depths. My stomach growled with the birds' chirping, but, knowing that I was already late for Madame Reena, I decided against stopping in town or at the house. I used to wonder if, had I chosen to go home first, any of this would have happened; but you were a fervent fire growing steadily duller (or louder, depending on whether I love you or hate you) and, your heart, constructed in its tessellation of glaciers, was always going to sink—one way or another.

    Madame Reena's house was small and cosy and covered in floral prints. There were approximately three billion chairs—winged chairs and club chairs and slipper chairs and occasional chairs—all with such thin, spindly legs, you were pumped with adrenaline just standing next to them; never mind allocating actual weight to their threadbare surface. There was always the faint scent of dog and tea in the air, heavily masked by the flowery perfume Madame Reena received every six months from an 'admirer' in Belgium.

    Of course, you knew all of this. You lived there.

    I don't think you knew the whole story behind Madame Reena, though. She was not actually French. Rumours circulating her arrival thirty-two years ago suggest that she was really the daughter of a long-dead banker in England, who insisted that if she did not finish her education properly at the university of his choice, she would have to leave home immediately and forget her inheritance. Being the free-spirited, fiery young woman she was, she packed her bags and spent five years travelling Europe, living off the good heartedness of locals in foreign towns. She settled briefly in France; enjoying wines and perfumes and onions and romantic, forgotten towns in the mountains. Thus, Madame Reena was born. 

    Except Madame Reena found her life of hedonism unfulfilling. She heard a report about the growing number of orphaned children in America and made the decision to move and look after as many kids—within fostering law—as she could.

    I know all of this because I've lived in the same town (Thomson, Nowhere, USA) as her all my life—that is, all eighteen (almost nineteen) years of it. Thomson, Nowhere, USA hasn't always been big enough to be called a town, and I think that its improved status from Nothing, Nowhere, USA to an actual living, breathing town was directly proportional to Madame Reena and her unquenchable desire for carting new kids in every few months. I suspect that if you gathered up all the children that she had ever fostered and stuck them back into Thomson at the same time, it's population would be large enough to rival that of the Big Apple's.