Reverse

Chapter 7

Dear universe,

I'm having more fun here that I ever thought I would. I love the farm, I love the sky over the farm and I love how the breeze tosses my hair to the side. Layla and I always have disheveled hair, and all the other old people always throw dirty looks at us, but what do we care about?

Two years at the farm and I think I'll never grow sick of it. Layla is so much like me, I feel like I've made a friend for life. Sometimes- she's too much like me. We like the same things, and we get upset over the same things. I wonder how two people can be so alike.

But, she never comes to the library with me. I love that place- often the peace and quiet becomes overwhelming but books have held my hand from the beginning and I'm not letting them go.

Rarely, I think she gets a little silly. It never bothered me before but I've started noticing that she's managed to get under my skin a few times. But then again, it'll sort out on its own and we'll forget about it, I know.

I'm excited and worried about the future at the same time.

I do not know how to explain it.

I get exhausted quickly and I haven't stayed up till midnight for a long, long time. I'm still 78 years old, and I'm bound to be tired all the time, right? But I was hoping, and really wishing, that we can get to talk again.

You're the only one I know from my past.

Anyway, you should know that writing this letter took a really long time and I had to do it in secret, which made it even more tedious. Layla and I experimented with some funny signatures of our names, the point of this entire letter was to show you mine.

Yours,

Coral

For the first time in my life, I feel like too much is happening. Everything keeps changing, my 12-year-old brain has started to notice a lot of things that never made sense to me. Like how all my dresses look so old, and how my knees are always stained with mud, just like Layla's. But she doesn't seem to mind it. So even I don't. Do all 12-year-olds feel this way? Isn't it such a burden, carrying around so many thoughts?

Everyday, Hillary throws glances at Layla and I, like we're some kinds of immature children. She whispers to the other helpers, pointedly glancing at us. I fail to understand why people are so secretive of their opinions- why can't they just say it to our face? I find it frustrating and sickening. Layla, on the other hand, doesn't seem to notice how they look at us, how their stares burn into my skin.

Change, I suppose, is beautiful in its own way. It brought me to the farm and to Layla, but tore me apart from my blue nurse. I could vaguely remember the days I spent with my myself, in a place I never really belonged. The farm felt like a place I could fit into, but was it only because I had Layla by my side? Our knees are covered with scabs and we still draw into the mud using thin branches from the nearby willow tree. It had begun to feel slightly monotonous, and the time I keep to myself in the library is slowly increasing.

It is a typical Sunday morning, and the sun's rays do nothing to illuminate the gloomy mood surrounding the farm. One of the ancient people, who yearned day and night to pass a judgmental comment about Layla or I, had suffered a stroke at around midnight. Everyone was asleep. And she had breathed her last.

This, being my first encounter with death, isn't something I'm accustomed to. It is new and foreign and I hate it, everyone seems to be so dull after it. Death is like a switch and it just turns all the happiness within people off. Layla and I sit at the table, and I feel the sadness radiating from the very stone walls of our house. It makes me want to pull my hair out. Change also isn't beautiful in its own way.

Then they come.

They come and take her lifeless body away.

They take it on a stretcher.

They cover her with a white cloth.

They put her in a white van.

And they take her away.

And nobody says anything.

Nobody stops them from taking her away.

And she has nobody to stand at her grave, no family to leave flowers at her feet.

And neither did the rest of us.

And that is why we were stuck in this old place.

I feel conflicting emotions rise within me. I would probably get married someday, and only my family would know my secret. But I would never get to grow old with them, and even if my future husband and I decide to spend our whole lives together, in the end I would be a teenager living with an old, old man. But then, I feel a tendril of relief creeping in, as I know I'm not going to die here, or like this. I would probably die as new born baby, perhaps around people in a hospital, or perhaps abandoned and all alone. Either way, my fate is completely tangential to everyone around me, and that reassures me a lot more that it should.