"THIS ISN'T FAIR!" I roar at the sky. "GIVE IT BACK!"
The sky doesn't answer, as usual. I glower at the low-hanging blanket of clouds. "GIVE IT BACK!" Still nothing. Someone jogs by, pretending not to see me. I stomp along the path, muttering to myself.
"Gods damn son of a whore bitch harlot, fuckin' hell, goats spawn mangy pox-ridden..."
Somebody falls in step beside me. I don't turn to look.
"Go away."
Nothing.
"I think I hate you," I inform the air in front of me.
The mud turns to gravel, then to pavement. I plunk down on a bench, engraved with countless names, and look over the place I love most in the world.
"What do you want?" I almost don't hear, I'm thinking so loud.
"This," I grump, flapping a hand at the view. "Everything I lost. My school, my classes, my boyfriend, my friends, my self-esteem, my sanity, my ability to get up and take a shower in the morning-"
"You shower at night."
"I hate you." But I don't mean it, and I never really have. School's not a sunken crater in the ground - it's waiting. Classes will come around again. My friends still love me, even when I'm afraid they're losing patience with me. My self-esteem only has one or two major holes in it, all fixable, and I never really went totally bonkers.
I'll become functional again, sooner or later.
"I miss him," I tell the wind, and the wind leads me back through the forest. There's a steep hill, slick with mud, covered in rocks. A single line of footprints winds up and up. It looks like the person slipped here, grabbed onto a tree there, hit a rock there - but made it in the end.
The path is narrow; two people trying to go up at the same time would have just tripped over each other until both were bruised, battered, muddy, and nowhere.
One person, by themselves, made it.
I study a footprint in front of me and carefully step onto it, like Cinderella into the glass slipper.
Or like the stepsister.
~*~
No comments:
Post a Comment