Dear Adelaide,

13

Dear Adelaide,

When I woke I didn't wake.

The room was alive and it was speaking.

The room was alive and it was singing.

An eerily climbing tune, leaking from the ceiling and dribbling down the walls, and soaking into the floorboards. Filling the cracks in the wood. Spiderweb cracks.

A melody I could hum along to, or dance to. One I knew, one that held me locked in honey glow and had once pointed and twisted my feet.

No more a tune tapped out on ivory, but one sung, by the walls, or by her voice. Her voice moving through the walls in pulsing waves, climbing over those small animal cries and drowning them out.

A sound that sunk me, like a rock in my mattress, hardening my muscles to encase my bones in a body trap so the only amount of shutter was of my eyelids. A veiny existence, causing me to believe I was looking straight through them.

Screens of skin.

Song I hear standing hours at a mirror, while the world darkens outside round windows. And days fly by and I grow more familiar, with each cadence.

Melody moving, throbbing through wavering walls. A melody I knew. Coaxing my body through time.

Moved through the walls and whispered hot into my ear. A hum I could sing along to, buzzing beneath my skin. Her voice. The song she wrote for her-

Not for her new sister dear. But for her-

Notes I knew.

Not for her eighteenth birthday.

But for her-

The room was alive and it was singing.

*   *  *  *

The ribbon in my hair matched the violet of the trembling buds overhead. The ripe taste of honeysuckle on my tongue, as I swung back and forth beneath the twin Crepe Myrtle's. Not a fallen bud in sight to drag my shoes through.

I spotted Alec moving through the garden, a bundle under one arm and a basket on the other. He'd told me to wait, as he retrieved the picnic from its usual spot hidden in the bushes. I'm not quite sure how, but we'd of late become professional picnickers. I was actually astounded to see him dressed in a shirt and trousers that weren't smudged with dirt from the garden, his curling waves of hair combed back in a tight old-fashioned way, one far different than the way all the teenage boys I'd known wore their hair nowadays, all left hanging in a greasy mange.

His freckles seemed darker than ever, as he drew near, and they had spread all the way down his terribly long neck in the sunlight. He really was wonderful to spend time with. And we had been spending much time together. I was beginning to admire him enormously.

His feet crunched up beside me. He laid the blanket out along the grass and began unloading our picnic, pulling out sandwiches and oranges and a bottle of red colored juice.

Red.

I stood from my swing to take a seat on the blanket beside him. I messed with the golden locket around my neck. I thought a great deal about the ancient key that hung secretly not far below it, tucked secretly into my dress.