"I found her! I found my real mum!" Gasped Ruby as she held onto the ice cold street lamppost gulping the cold winter air into her warm lungs. Her heart pounded with a blend of excitement and exertion from running away from the corner café where her biological mother worked as a waitress.
She wasn't how she expected. No heels. No tidy flat ballerina shoes like she imagined. Instead, she wore platform military style buckled boots adding two inches to her height. Dressed in an oversized dark green sweater teamed with ripped stone wash blue jeans worn over black net tights, completed layered necklaces, she was far from her imagination.
Is that really her? Ruby took out the scrunched yellow note from her coat with the address, her breath visible like smoke fast and thick. Unable to believe a woman so young could have birthed her, she looked at the green neon sign of the shop in dazzling green lights.
'Java Lounge.'
After ten months of researching on the internet and visiting strange places, Ruby finally found her. Ruby's ocean eyes widened under the green neon lights, like a child who'd discovered the fun fair. This was the start of a roller coaster journey ahead. The fifteen year old romanticised the reality of connecting to her biological mother, sharing secrets, maybe she would help her play the guitar she hid under her bed? With a barbell stud pierced in her right eyebrow, her biological mother was a rebel, a world away from her upper class, polished, entrepreneur mature adoptive mother.
Standing at a safe, secret distance she took out her mobile and zoomed in taking a few shots. Her journey finding and connecting the missing link in her life begun from tonight. A lost heritage, like Narnia, the book she read every night under her bedsheets since she was ten years old. Ruby wanted to step into the wardrobe and enter her Kashmiri heritage, a far away world which she'd seen on the television, on social media and videos. She wanted to immerse herself into the smell of cinnamon and garlic, the sound of dohl blasting at colourful weddings, where the women sang foreign songs in a choir, clapping their henna patterned hands and glass bangles dancing on their wrist. It was the only fact her adoptive parents told her, that her biological mother was Kashmiri; this plunged Ruby in conundrum, whose azure blue eyes did she inherit?
The speeding, pulsating blue sirens raced by, police on an emergency call out. A sign that things would not be easy. It would be a tumultuous journey claiming her birth mother. The joy she felt in her heart, the warmth that thawed the ice in the pit of her stomach on a December night would soon fade away. Her birth mother was a world away from her the dreams she created. She was a wildfire that would raze her calm, sheltered life to ashes.