DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

July 8, 2015

June sat on the floor, photos spread out across her.  The pulse of the neighborhood permeated her walls, through the crack of the screen window she could hear the pedaling of bikes and the solidarity of children from adults that came with the first week of summer.  It was the middle of June, the month she was named after, and she had just developed a roll of pictures from her little sister’s graduation party.  The ceiling fan light shone over her, and the whizzing of the fan blew the gentlest of a breeze over her hair.  She straddled her project, one that she promised to give to her mom by the night’s end; a photo book filled with memories of the night.

Flipping through the pictures, the familiar faces smiled at her; assuring, unconditionally loving faces   that clung to her like static.  She placed one in the album, of Julie sitting, eating cake with Aunt Kylie, then the next, of Brendan dancing with her Mom, then the next, until she was done.  She closed the album, to put it on the nightstand, and traced the words on the cover, GRADUATION, with her fingertips, almost losing herself with the soft glow of room.  She walked to her bedroom and had every intent on throwing herself onto her bed and sleeping for the next twenty years, but the ultraviolet radiance of the light that came from her window box attracted her to it.

June sat on the pink and grey quilt that covered the oak wood of the window box and opened the glass window.  A gust of wind blew at her, welcoming her to think what she wanted of the second floor of Deerwood and the mystery that only the youth could find on summer nights like these.  The green leaves of the tree next to her shook, like a whisper to a friend, or a wave, made of leaves and wind instead of water.  It was so quiet she felt like her sense of hearing had been taken away and she was using some other sense, but she wasn’t complaining.  She felt like the trees and the phone lines and the birds that glided their own ways through the planes of the altitudes were only hers, like everything that she could see at this height was really heaven, not just her neighborhood from her second floor bedroom.  The sky wasn’t black, it was barely navy, the darkest of blue possible.  She remembered being six years old, sitting at this exact same spot, reading Peter Pan, and imagining that Tinkerbell would come and sprinkle her with fairy dust so that she could go and see what else was out there, see if there was some place where the sky was more than blue, where the trees grew taller and the leaves greener and the birds flew faster, and she could be part of it all. 

These times happened once in a great while, when she could sit and be alone and feel a type of tranquility that she couldn’t quite explain to anyone else, that she didn’t really want to, because it was hers, when she could just sit and be and feel happy.  The last time it happened she was standing, waiting for the bus, at five-thirty in the morning, alone, on the street corner, and it had just rained.  The streets were wet and full of puddles, and cars slushed by.  She was thinking about a French test; she needed to study for it on the bus; and she looked down to see a puddle, clear as glass, with a few orange and red leaves under it.  She noticed how the water held and protected the leaves in all their beauty, and she couldn’t get enough of it.  She stared at the image until the bus came, for at least ten minutes, in the deepest amount of contentment that she had ever experienced.

This was similar to how she felt when she sat at the window box, when she felt even better than she did when she was with a ton of people, like it had been at her sister’s graduation party.  That night she sat and breathed in the air for one last moment, closed the window, got into bed, and fell asleep, watching the moon through her window until her eyelids shut.

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.