Dream Always True

Crisp blue commingled with unplacable green along the roadside. The sun was finally living up to its label as a "celestial body," not just a lamp that hovers above like a clingy parent. Winds rollicked and roared, rippling through the reeds in infinite waves. Her shirt ballooned out, an ugly parachute that was a testament to the plane she was leaping from. She smothered the hand-me-down Chiefs jersey, keeping it folded down as she trekked against the wind. The car lay parked nearly a mile behind, the hazard lights warning her of each second that she wasted in her unhappiness. After coming all this way, in a desperate plunge to escape the rooms without views, without a tunnel to the sky, she breathed in with the sky all around her.

And it stank. It was rank, foul, tainted with the metallic odor of the shackles that she had carried with her from the life she no longer understood. She sat on the curb and yanked grasses up by the roots. She stuffed the dirt under her fingernails for safekeeping, even hoping that they would infuse with her spirit and purge those persistent images with a new set that she could bear. It was futile. There was no way out. She closed her eyes against the thunder of her nightmare.