apologies // hemmings

eight

Today was a bad day.

Alexis was constantly struggling with trying to be happy and not a total scrouge about life. Key word: trying. Some days she did a favorable job of painting a smile on her face and laughing along with everyone's jokes at lunch. She was able to make it through class silently, making herself scarce in the classroom. She did well enough to convince her mother that she was alright (which was an incredible job considering her mom knew her better than she knew herself sometimes - Alexis could be an extremely successful actress if she wanted).

However, somedays - days like that sunny Thursday in Ocala, Florida, where the weather was warm and the teenagers were buzzing with excitement for the weekend and everyone seemed content with life - Alexis had a hard time. She didn't enjoy the sunshine, quite the opposite, actually. She despised the sun and the warmth and all the things about Florida that tourists thrived off of.

She didn't enjoy living near the beach, nor did she wish to be able to go swimming in the middle of December. Alexis loved the clouds. She had a collection of pictures in her photo gallery on her cell phone of storm cloud pictures that she had taken in the past year.

Alexis loved the rain and the changing of the colors in September and she loved the crisp air that chilled her hands and wearing scarfs and having to buy new boots every year because of the unreasonable amount of salt that was thrown onto the sidewalk. She loved buying hot cafe mocha's at Tim Horton's every day before school and she took pride in the fact that the girl that worked at the drive through had her order ready every morning.

She also loved the snow. As much as she cursed it up and down when she had to clear her car after spending twenty minutes in the grocery store, and the fact that she had to buy new gloves twice throughout the winter because she always lost them. She would insist that she couldn't wait for the summer in the middle of January after it had been snowing since the end of October and wouldn't stop until the middle of April and she had to spend her spring break shoveling snow from her driveway. She would curse the inevitable flooding that came with the rainy season and the snow melting that damaged her car and made driving one of the biggest obstacles she'd ever encounter. No matter how many times she would vow that snow was the worst thing God could have created, she couldn't deny it's simple beauty. The memories that came with her child would constantly fill her head: building snow forts after the plows had forced the snow onto the corner of her yard into piles taller than her, snow ball fights with her brother and sledding down the hills across the street from her childhood home. She loved the feeling of snowflakes on her tongue and she would never forget the third grade, when she was dared to shove her face in the snow for a whole minutes - and happily complied before missing school for a week due to a cold. She missed the superstition of turning her pajamas inside out and flushing an ice cube down the toilet and sleeping with a spoon under her pillow in hopes of a snow day, and the thrill of waking up in the morning to another inch of the frozen wonder on the ground and the name of her school on the news, saying it was cancelled for the day.

Alexis missed the beauty of Michigan and going to the Great Lakes in the summer to her friends' cottages and tubing and and jet skiing. She missed being able to tell people where she lived by using her hand as a map. She missed going into the city to stare at the graffitti and the beauty of street art. She missed supporting her favorite Detroit sports' teams, no matter how much they sucked during the season, because everyone from Michigan did it. She missed going to baseball games with her youth group and chanting with the sweet homeless man on the corner, "eat 'em up, tigers, eat 'em up," She missed the grief of the entire city when he was killed by a car, and how going to a baseball game was never the same, but everyone had him in their memories.