Her Flowers and my loneliness

Act 1

It was that time of the day where the sunbeams cast shadows all over the path before me.  Every ray promised warmth and every spot of premature darkness sucked it away. But it didn’t phase me, nothing did these days.  

The path that I walked on was neither city nor country but some wanna-be of both, and so it ended up redundantly ordinary and neither.  Shops lined the left side of the street and forest lined the other. I walked the sidewalk that only ran a path next to the shops that probably funded its creation for their prospective customers.  

With every step though my eyes drifted to the trees to my right.  Instead of the dense dark lines cast by the sunlight against the buildings and telephone poles, the leaves created an abstract speckling of soft sun against the vegetated ground that covered much of the soil it all grew from.  

Weeks and months and even years ago that had been a sight that struck awe in me.  So much awe that I’m sure it spilled from my heart and my eyes sparkled with it. I’m sure the wonder had once pulsed through my veins and lit up my skin.  I hadn’t been much for awe and wonder these days.

I hadn’t been much of anything these days, and on days like these it was hard to completely believe I had ever been.

My nose begins sniffling and I stop walking for a moment to just breathe.  I try to convince my nose that the spring air in May always had a bite to it and that is why it was choking up, why I was choking up.  

People have told me all my life that spring meant new beginnings but this spring, this May, the 22nd to be exact, I had met an end.  Today was the day that my boss finally fired me. I had felt it coming for a long time, since the bustle of the holidays ended and they no longer needed so many people sitting at their desks.  

The anxiety of knowing that soon, every minute you spent working on something for someone else would become fruitless effort.  It was a suffocating thing. It choked the awe and wonder from my very soul and left me empty. Till empty was my new descriptor, maybe even my middle name if this went on long enough.  

Would it continue now that I will truly lose everything else?  

I had spent the end of winter and the beginning of spring catching up.  Catching up on my bills, catching up with friends and family, catching up my grades, catching up on sleep, but this would reverse all that.  In the weeks maybe months it could take me to get something new, something sustainable, I would be behind once again. The turtle who truly could never win because some rabbits never tire.  

A family chattering behind me jolts me from my thoughts and they walk around me stealing glances as I roughly wipe up my fallen tears.  They continue down the path and forget the girl tearing up alone on the sidewalk holding a box of all her office things she should have never accumulated.

The sun moved in the sky and the shadow in front of me slowly shifts and engulfs me.  22 is my new unlucky number. If only my birthday was closer than November so I could quickly shed the age.  Maybe my 23rd year would bring the wonder back into the world, into my world.

I stared ahead of me for another long while and listened to the sound of the dread of going back home to my rundown apartment  to my fish who I could no longer afford to feed or keep the light on for. Instead of going home I walked to the end of the block I was on and turned to the street on my left.  

It was unfamiliar territory to me but at the moment all I wanted to be was lost, erased, I desperately craved a new beginning.  I wished for the beginning of a story with a happy ending you hear about in the prologue so you don’t have to skip to the last chapter in an attempt to keep your heart safe.