Meet Me Halfway🖇

A bridge and her flowers.

Third person's point of view~

It was two weeks before eight grade ended.

She ran off again. She still wore colors then. Her dark brunette hair was tied up in a ponytail scrunchie, unbrushed due to the lack of purpose she discovered for herself after her dad took off. What purpose was there when no one was going to pat her combed hair and tell her what a beauty she is?

She ran off again. The fourth time in the last two weeks. The police have memorized her mother's phone number. But right now, they laid their hands off the phone. She'll come back, they said, she always does.

And she did that day, but it wasn't like any other time she ran off.

She ran off to the side of the town she wasn't supposed to run to, and saw what she wasn't supposed to see.

Blazing flames, the stench of rotting flesh, a woman with no hope. But the woman communicates anyway to people across the street, to the people in the shop nearby, to the people walking anywhere remotely near. The people she all reached out to for help had one thing in common.

They all didn't understand sign language.

The little girl that wore purple that day ran over to the woman signing "family" and "help."

She understood from the little sign language her aunt taught her before she moved two thousand miles away.

The little girl, who would eventually grow to love purple so much that she dyes her hair that color, runs off.

But she doesn't run away, she runs towards it.

"Help?" She communicates with her hands.

The woman nods her head. She starts signing frantically, assuming the little girl understood everything, but she didn't yet. She wasn't that advanced yet.

The girl signs "I don't know."

The woman tugs her hand, saying help me, with nothing but her pleading eyes. She tugs her towards her crumbling home, smoke rises up as the burning wood and concrete cascaded down to the ground faster than the little girl running off from the school parking lot.

The little girl runs again, to a nearby pedestrian.

"Call 911. Now."

Now they understood.

But surprise surprise, it was too late.

The little girl blamed herself. Why did she not take up more lessons from her aunt? If she had, she wouldn't have to have watched the woman running around the street while no one understood her.

The little girl thought she was the misunderstood one. But she wasn't.

The little girl thought she was running off for the right reasons. But she wasn't.

How ungrateful she was.

Freshman year starts in two and a half months and she doesn't hesitate to check the box next to Freshman ASL 1. Never again will someone else be misunderstood, she told herself.

"Under the bridge," the woman signed later on.

The growing girl didn't understand, but nodded her head.

When the woman walked away from her doorstep and down the road that leads downtown, the little girl followed, making sure she knew where she was.

"Under the bridge," she whispered to herself as she saw her new friend settle her blanket with the corner hardened from the fiber being slightly burned. Thank god they saved that. At least she had one thing left to lose.

The growing girl left, content with knowing where to go when she felt ungrateful, alone, discouraged, you name it.

And that's what happened. For the next three years, she gathered food and water bottles to last a week until she came to visit again. In the summer before her junior year, the woman passes, probably from hypothermia. The now teenage girl never found out why, she just discovered some flowers in the woman's place on top of the worn blankets. The teen never knew who left those flowers, she wondered who else knew the woman.

She picked up the rotting bouquet, throwing it in the trash can and heads straight to the shop to replace them with her own.

How selfish she was.

On the same day of the week for every single week afterwards, she watered the bouquet of flowers, disregarding the fact that the soil is shit and no sunlight reaches the flowers to keep them happy.

But somehow they kept their spines straight and reached the end of the bridge's shadow to peek at the sun. With addition to the teen's water, the flowers survived.

 But they weren't living.

The teen's visits started dying down from once every few days to once a week.

The flowers died.

The teen wasn't surprised. She replaced them and that was that. She wasn't living either, she was merely surviving too. How long until she'll share the same fate?

A few weeks into her junior year, after she abandoned her leather jacket and hadn't visited her bridge in two weeks, she'll come back again.

To find the new set of flowers she left weeks ago, surviving.

How can that be?

Find out and see.