The Star The Sunflower Faced

chapter one

love at first sight

a question of fate that is yet to be answered

I knew my dad would never trust me again if he witnessed what's happening in my room. A sixteen-year-old girl, her leg and camera draped out the window's sill and her other one perched on the carpeted floor, supporting all her weight and the gadget. I almost feel bad for it. But I've tried my hardest to close my eyes and lull my mind to doze off. Yet it wont stop questioning any noise that itched my ears and fluttered my eyes open, like any dog you own. Sometimes, sleep loves to elude us all and we, sometimes, love to avoid it as well. Why? We are all selfish rebels. It is perfectly okay to be one as long as you don't hurt, my dad once said.

All I wanted was distance. It felt like the smoldering, red sun loving the Earth and vice versa. As it orbits around her, it must have distance so none will be left to pointless ashes or cooled to it's anguished core and remain as something that once lived. I tagged my camera along to picture anything I would want to see and remember for the rest of my living seconds, and possibly show to other people as well. Even if I didn't have that much friends. It's not like I'm despised by other people, I just don't interact with teens my age and around that much to grow a fruit of sweet, honeysuckle-ish friendship.

After some incoherent mumbles and screams that were tightly bottled, all of my body squeezes out the aperture. I'm actually surprised that I got out since I ate three chocolate bars today, one of them being I stole from my so lovely yet mischievous brother. If he saw me he'd be dashing to dad's room any second, snitching on me with all honesty in his words and revenge drilling to the vessel of his veins. I hate him sometimes.

I close the window shut and immediately get embraced by the icy hug of early autumn. I swear it is only November yet it feels like Christmas swarms the air with its frostiness; all I had on was a thin brown jumper and my blue fuzzy socks. I stepped on the ground alike to a fairy's cove. As if I would awake it's sleeping city if I stomped, which wasn't true. My abode sat on a hill where the environment was anything but loud. And the way downhill is a lamp-freckled but quiet downtown.

As soon as I was far from my bedroom, I began to flee like a decade-old bird stuck in it's cage since the first crack of its egg. I took strides and stopped whenever I saw a lump on the ground, observing it every once in a while. One of them was a rough, dark etch of a squirrel with a pecan in its hands, though not eating it. Maybe it's bringing it to its family. I've always wondered about how different animals and species bring food to their loved ones. But I think animals question more about us, about how we love. Funny, almost ironic, how we've always thought and described animals as creatures that have strange or "unrealistic" habits and we judge them or use them in different puns and jokes, or a metaphor in a poem drying of ideas to describe weird and abstract feelings. When maybe in their mind they are doing the same to us. Matter of fact, we're animals, too.

I walk to the meadow garden not far away from us; it's not ours but my dad likes to plant there or just breathe in the caskets thrown with daisy petals and sweet rose water spilling from his nose and efforts. Yes, he was certainly a very classic, fifty-year-old romantic when it came to the prettiest scenery nature has offered to our own orbiting asteroid.

I near the bouquets of asters in sleepy blue and innocent white sit there so gracefully, yet so silently as they speak no word and swish their star-like ears in the autumnly wind. Dad told me one time that the inspiration from my name came from this fall flower, and he added the H for "Hope". Weird, I know. But I'm his daughter so I'm an odd one too. Besides, that's why I love him so much.

My eyes and feet shift to the sunflower patch and only now had I recalled the nostalgic memories that I have blown bubbles to. I still remember them, just merely now. My mind reminded about how my father used to tell me stories here, of how mom's favorite flower was the sunflower or what he'd like to call, "Isabella" or vice versa. He proposed here, at the peak of day where the sunflowers faced her face, where tears cascaded her flush cheeks and she smacked him jokingly with playfulness coating her palm and embarrassment painting her smile. He was and still is his sunflower. It was the opposite of my situation at this very minute of midnight.