Author: Olavia Kite

She had never seen him.

She had never had the opportunity to feel the soft fibers of his hair, the possible roughness of his unshaved cheeks, the mild humidity of his warm breath. She couldn’t tell the story of his scars, for he had none in her mind, where he resided—

That is, whenever he wasn’t busy being himself in real life.

She wasn’t always like this.

Reality was her god, as she thought life was written in a book to which she’d always have access. After all, nothing extraordinary had ever happened to her, locked up in her little town in the Midwest. ‘Locked up’ might just be a silly saying, keeping in mind how free one can be when running up and down the pastures in broad Illinois. But sometimes freedom, or the wide view of it, seems much worse a prison than the actual set of barred walls. The emptiness surrounding seems like solidified void, and the infinite horizon gives crippled wings to those who dare to look beyond the two or three chapped trees behind an old couple’s powder blue house.

Deirdre Gallagher hated her life. She began to hate it as soon as she realized her feet would never stand upon anything different than the sad road which pointed to wavy infinity, or the silly glass museum which intended to deck the whole, creepily green, minuscule town. Every morning she’d gaze through the window at the cars passing by, following them until they became dots and vanished at some turn. Sometimes she pictured herself inside those cars, and after years of daily observation she had learned to recognize the faces within the colored metal carcasses flying by the forgotten village of Woodbine.

Sometimes I’m seen as a widow whose husband never died.

To them, happy memories are shadows, forecasting a meagre, neverending absence. They delve into my eyes, looking for that stubborn tear which refused to see the sun, and the rainbow in my clothes fades into black when I pass by.

Don’t they know I have never intended to weave a shroud?

However, sometimes, the dirt in my hands is visible—

But that’s only me, burying myself in my lonely silence.

The lights. The stars. The jingles. Red and green. Everywhere.

It’s been hardly a couple of days since a feeble attempt to recreate Halloween took place, and Christmas is already in the air. Already—! In November!!!

Maybe it’s because we don’t have falling leaves nor pumpkins nor apple cider that we get Christmas so soon. We have nothing to entertain our minds with while the green/red hullabaloo arrives. We ignore what it feels to have the cold breeze blowing out the candles of summer, rain being replaced by thousands of feather-like vegetable flames. Days are endless, identical twins succeeding each other, an infinite army of time.

We need Christmas to get out of our routine, to see old faces which seem new every year, to change the appearance of our houses in order to start anew in January… The same old routine with a brand new face— or is it a new routine there where we’ve always been?

All I know is, it’s too early for the firs to be chopped down. If only we had little squirrels to chase those non-existent winter blues out of our minds…