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I don't know why, but I felt suddenly very dizzy. Disorientation swept over my body and mind, and the thousand shades of green before me started to swim in my eyes, forcing them shut. My hands unfolded from my lap and grabbed onto the ground on either side of me. I steadied myself, staring intently into the blackness of my eyelids.I breathed deeply, and began counting to fifteen. It was silly, I realized. Childish and stupid, but I counted anyway, and when my breathing had steadied, I folded my arms again over my legs.
It was a very bright, lazy, empty Sunday afternoon in the last throws of summer. A cloud swam across the blue sky, and I tried to give shape to it. For a moment I imagined that I saw something, a dragon, but the form faded in my mind and I realized it had been my imagination. I craned my head backward, looking across the rest area. A few picnic tables, a small building with two bathrooms and a candy and soda machine, and my lonely car, parked on a grassy spot a dozen , I looked down the embankment I sat on. Waves of grass, and then lines of trees that transformed into a thicket and then a forest which continued to the distant horizon, where a line of mountains splintered the land and sky.
She was coming. I thought to myself. She is definitely coming. And yet, something deep inside me, a snarling, bestial force told me that she wasn't coming. The creature was bleak, concealed in darkness and very dark itself. It wrapped around me, strangling me like a boa constrictor, pressed its mouth close to my ear and whispered to me that she wasn't coming, that she had never intended to come. I felt the beast seize around me and I tried to throw him off. Childish, again, yet still I imagined myself, standing tall and noble. I failed, though, and the fear continued to chew inside my gut, my hands clasping tighter around me knees as I waited. Waited. Waited. And began to feel she really wasn't coming.
Then, she came.
Read more to find out why she came ..
