Luna

Senses

        Once upon a time there was a girl, in a dark, dark room. It was hard for her to see. She was half blind, after all. That's why she liked the darkness. It didn't make sense to anyone but her, but being only half blind was worse than not being able to see at all. In the dark, she couldn't see at all, so her other senses were heightened. Like smell, touch, sound. She relied on smell, touch, and sound to get around. In the night, she heard her father walking down the hall, heard him opening and closing the door to his room. She knew the coast was clear.

        She found it entertaining to walk without seeing. She hit nothing, tripped over nothing. Others tripped and fell over things they easily could've seen. Eyesight was clearly useless, she thought, but people who had sight overestimated it. How stupid it was to assume you can see everything even when you weren't looking at it. Can you see something behind you? No. Can you hear or smell something behind you? Absolutely. She stretched her legs downward to feel each step as she walked down the stairs. She stumbled a bit; at the bottom of the staircase, she expected her foot to land on another step when there wasn't one. Soon, she thought to herself, I'll remember exactly how many steps there are.        

        She walked through her house, not feeling the walls, but simply remembering the paths and doorways from before she lost sight, and recreating the floor plan in her mind. She walked through the living room, then kitchen, all the way to the back door. She felt around for the handle, then turned it. She didn't remember the paths through the backyard, so it was a bit tricky for her to get to where she wanted to go. However, she had a pool in the backyard and she could hear the soothing sound of calm waves crashing into one another. She knew the path was to the right of the pool, so she followed the sound.

        She reached the dreaded area. This would be the hardest. Her two dogs, May and June (named after their birth months), got their scent on this part of the backyard. Therefore, there's dog poop all over the path to the shed. She can't see anything, so she can't avoid the poo that way. She can't touch it, for obvious reasons. She can't hear the poo. She'd have to put extra effort into smelling the exact location of each clump of dog poo. She was bound to fail, with an extra-stinky punishment. Regardless, she needed this. It was her only chance, her only freedom.

        She was expected to be a perfect little princess. That's right, she lived in a mansion. All that money, so willingly thrown in anyone's direction, and they hadn't paid anybody to pick up the poo. Anyways, she was expected to have perfect posture, to stick her pinky at the perfect degree while drinking tea, to paint her nails a color of pink that even half-blind, she knew was sickeningly girly. It was suffocating. At night, she had an ounce of freedom, a single hour of freedom that she stretched out all day. Only an hour of her life was truly hers, and despite a blind little girl's worst nightmare, she started to walk the path.

The girl walked all the way through. She may have stepped on either dog's poo, but she was half sure she hadn't because her shoe didn't sink into any of the things she stepped in. She made it- the shed. Smiling, she wrapped her hand around the handle and pulled. The shed was full of things that needed to be kept safe. Electronics, fancy shoes, and the thing she came for- her bike. She felt a thrilling sense of pride inside her for making it all the way here without messing up along the way. She was way more than a little blind girl. It's like her late grandmother always said to her: Someday, you will do great things in life, no matter what anybody else says.

        She grabbed the handlebars on her bike and pulled it out of the shed. She knew her bike would roll through most of the dog's poo, just as it had done every time before, but she'd learned not to care. She knew better than to roll her bike back through the house. If the bike hitting anything didn't wake her parents up, the dogs' (who for some reason were scared of the bike) would bark, and that would surely wake everyone up. Instead, she rolled it through the back gate. The backyard could be reached from the front of the house through the gate, just as the front of the house could be reached from the backyard.

Once outside, the girl hopped upon the plush seat of her bike (also sickeningly pink) and rode. The wind whipping through her hair, she sensed how fast she was going. Laughing, she knew that to most people, it would be considered TOO fast. In fact, for a blind girl, everyone would think that any bike-riding at all would be considered too fast. "Preposterous!" she could basically hear them yelling. "Unsafe!" "A danger to society!" A bunch of idiots, she thought to herself.

        She rode, but even though it didn't make sense... she felt everything. She knew if there was a car coming, or if there was someone walking across the street, or if anything at all was in her way. She was one with the world in the nighttime. In the day it was quite the opposite. She needed a shoulder to lean on when the going got tough. Here, she played a solo act; every muscle in her body worked just as it should, the moonlight lit up the distant corners of the room that were only darkened further in sunlight. That's why she did this every day. Why she wasn't scared of getting caught. Wasn't scared of things people with sight are. She'd never felt anything quite like it.

        She rode, but even though she could do this all night, she knew she had to be well enough rested in the morning. If her parents suspected anything, the empowering light of the moon would be a distant memory. She turned herself around and rode back using only her extensive knowledge of the open road. She put her bike back, then retraced her steps back up to her room. She turned the handle as far down as it could go and slowly pushed it back into the door frame once she was in her room. This way it didn't creak as it glided across the hinges, didn't slam as it reached the end of its range. She felt the breeze as the window blew the outside wind through the sliver of opening in between her curtains.

        The girl walked toward it. She slid her hands to the ends of the curtain flaps, then slid her hands up to the curtain rod. She spread her arms apart, opening the window. Her room got instantly cold, how she liked it. She laid on her bed, leaving her blanket on the floor. She sighed.

        When she'd asked, her mother said she chose the girl's name because it sounded pretty, but that couldn't be true. Her mother couldn't have chosen the Spanish word for moon by coincidence. Couldn't have chosen the perfect name by chance. Her name was so pretty, so carefree. The girl smiled. The word for the moon-

        Luna.