Sky
Hit me as soon as I got out because you knew that I was mad. I’m the kind of woman they teach people like you to be afraid of. I’m not one for fiction but I can make exceptions. Write a little prose for you while my kitten snags my nylons.
Sky watched as the ribbons of sunlight danced their way across the horizon. This was a habit of hers. She was sure to be up at the same time every morning. Morning after morning as sunrises melted into sunsets, days into weeks, weeks into years, era after era, nothing had Sky’s attention like the rotation of the earth in space. Sky lived for the way that the fuschias and oranges bled into each other, blanketing the clouds in their vibrance.
All good things must come to an end, and Sky knew that, but even as blue took the place of the morning, she held onto the hope that she’d watch the sun painting the heavens again. And in the blue, the in-between, the daylight hours, Sky would begin again on her journey to the star that made all things possible. Believing that if she worked hard enough, she herself would dance with the sun.
Sky was patient and kind and rose with the flame of hope burning inside her as weeks of memories filed themselves away with the years gone by. Every day, Sky walked to the wall. Every day, Sky believed that the wall would give way and that she would make it to the world outside, to the sun that didn’t seem that far away. Every day, Sky crashed into the wall that was very much there and fell to the ground, exhausted but determined to try again tomorrow.
The wall was clear. So exquisitely transparent in its construction that even as she faced the wall head-on, its very existence was denied. So intrinsic to the world in its design that Sky was always asked why, if she wanted to dance with the sun so badly, she couldn’t just go outside. So embedded in the fabric of everyone’s story that those who refused to believe in the wall also told Sky that they couldn’t understand her because of the wall. Clearly, the wall was Sky’s biggest problem.
But the existence of the wall was so very easy to deny that this denial coursed through the veins of the outside. On the ground, exhausted, and on the other side, Sky heard that she could do anything that she set her mind to. She heard that she just needed to work harder. That the wall was no excuse. That Andromeda danced with the sun, so why couldn’t she? That on the outside, dancing with the sun was a rite of passage, a part of the bridge from adolescence to adulthood. How sweet it would be, Sky mused, to skate along the horizon, even if only for a moment before it drifted away from the place where the land meets the sea. How sweet is fantasy.
