Altered Perspective

Back again for the final time, she feels it like a stiffness in her bones, a reluctance in the body, as if denial will postpone the inevitable. The passing of summer tugs at her heart as she sits on the steps and watches the fluffy white clouds roll across the sky and the warmth seeping out on the horizon, so heat and passion is blurred by the water-colours of colder climes. She is wearing a skirt but it is too cold, as if summer was gone in the blink of an eye. The sickly taste of strawberry ice-cream, the scent of after sun soothing burning skin, the days stretching into the night, the endless hours, the months away. It is now all over, September more than half gone and she wants to kick, to scream, to beat and fight against it.

Around her peoples clothes are mismatched to the weather. Although sunny, the wind is a chill reminder that the best of the year is over, that now all that was ripe will start to turn, to ferment. She pulls her cardigan closer, wishes she had a jacket, knows that only a long hot bath will steam out the cold from her body. She should go, she should move, but by sitting on the college steps she is making silent protest against a future that seems so vast, so wide, lurking around the corner to swallow her up. The three extra years she brought through study are nearly up and she has almost blinked and missed them. She now has nine months, tops, to decide, to set herself in the direction she would like to go. Only such a feat would be easier if she were to know where she would like to head.

For now Lucrezia heads home, well, to her room, sparse, impersonal, her belongings still in their cases and crates. She isn’t one of those people who can make a home of anywhere. Away from her place of birth everywhere is like a hotel, her belongings sitting awkwardly waiting for someone to come and tidy them up. She lies on her bed, blanket pulled up to her knees. She lies and listens to everyone else moving, scurrying, thumping about around her. Shouts, calls, mobiles ring. The wind rustles outside and from somewhere comes the steady beat of music. She closes her eyes, apart from it all. She smiles. If she stays silent, for as long as she can, no-one, not even her friends will realise she is here. This, she discovers, she likes very much.

She has never suffered with unsociable behaviour before, has always elbowed her way right into the middle of a crowd. She would go out three, four times a week and return home regaling her friends with her misadventures, the buses that went in wrong directions, the drunk men who confused her with their sister. Returning in her second year she had rushed into London, had beat her welcome call upon every door, had dragged her friends from unpacking to the cafe, the bar, the park. This year, however, something has changed, she is out of sync with herself, she is content to wait to be called upon, to ignore the passing of time, to forget that wherever she will be in a years time is undecided, of her own making, and perhaps only a false comfort. If only she was one of those people who had a life plan, the ones who decide to be married with a baby by the time they’re twenty five, or those who pack up their lives in a back pack and fly half way across the world. If only she desired to be something like a nurse or an accountant. Or if she was loved beyond love. Maybe the future would be easier to slip into, like a favourite frock, that would fit and flatter in all the right places. Yes, she has dreams and is perplexed that at twenty two none of them have come remotely true. Where is the dashing millionaire fiance? The infamous art career? The contracts, the deals, the snaps in the paper? She is ridiculously young to others, hideously old to herself. Still growing, yearning, learning and frustrated at her own lack of direction, of ambition, of decision.