Vindicated

Chapter One

    In my more vulnerable years, when I’d so naively resigned myself to adolescence’s platonic norms, I discovered something very important. And I discovered it on my own, with no means of help from anything but my all too learned mind. All those nights slept in self-inflicting pity taught me that happiness, no matter how inadequate, is nothing but a choice.

    On the eve of my fifteenth birthday, my great grandmother Anna took me down to the forest in which I spent a fair part of my youth. She sat me down in a lawn chair beside the old crick and watched the trickling water rush by as fleetingly and overwhelmingly as childhood itself. In her hand she held a golden locket entwined with both my initials and hers.

    She said to me, “Marianne, what exactly is it that you want?”

    I have to admit I hadn’t thought about it much, nor was I completely sure of the nature of her question.

    I asked, “for what?”

    Her eyebrows burrowed tightly into the crevices of her porcelain skin. She glared at me interrogatorily as if her philosophical pursuits were to be expected and not taken lightly.

    “I don’t know, abstractedness?” I tried again. “Maybe a little trouble.”

    Anna’s palm brushed against mine and wove the locket through my fingertips. “Trouble,” she scoffed. Without hesitation, I pried the necklace open.

    Somewhere beyond the curtained wood, a bluebird was singing. The sunset poured through the trees in ripples of caramel. The world was silent. “There’s nothing here,” I said.

    “You don’t need anything in there,” Anna readjusted her glasses. “It’s a bloody locket. You think I’m getting sentimental? You think I took you all the way out here to put some stupid picture in this thing and make a speech about how grown up you are?”

    Yes, I whispered to myself.

    Anna coughed in disgust. “What you need,” she leaned forward in a hefty grunt, “along with the rest of your superficial, socially challenged generation, is out there.” She pointed daintily to the light beyond the trees as if reaching out for something although I could never figure out what. For a moment or so, the wood was aglow with prosperous premonitions of future glory. Anna and I had an understanding beyond the limitations of our generations and in that moment we lived and died in mutual triumph.

    My great grandmother passed away three months later with a tube down her throat and a dozen needles up and down various parts of her body. To my mother she left all but a relatively small sum of five thousand dollars which somehow ended up in my wavering hand.

    Weeks after Anna’s death, I rediscovered the locket hidden away in a small jewelry box on my dresser. I could almost hear the wood take its last breath before surrendering itself to night’s cold shadow. I thought of her and, although superstition is often far fetched and oozed in carefully constructed bullshit, I was almost certain she was thinking of me as well.

    Seven months later, I met Gabriel down at Paddington Station. Having committed his appearance flawlessly to memory, I found his chestnut brown curls and pathetic excuse for a sweater vest somewhat easy to identify amongst all the hustle and bustle of tourists hustling frantically to God knows where.

    The last time I saw Gabriel, I was eight years old. The family was all together for Christmas holidays and, as the other children were out and about with their robots and barbie dolls, we would sit together and tell stories. Our parents would often watch with confusion and amazement as our bright young minds flourished together and grew in ways even we did not think possible. The world was an ocean, Gabriel was the venturesome sea captain in constant pursuit of glory and I was the ship that carried him across the open waters.