Anna Brown For the Hope of it All
‘ Hey girly, do you need a hug?’ Sophie’ s Welsh lilt seeps through the bedroom door like ointment.
The generously large glass of far-too-cheap wine that I poured for myself, followed by the instant blasting of the most absurdly melancholic Taylor Swift record, probably makes it quite obvious that I do. I am exposed to the disturbing return I am making to my teenage dramatics; Sophie never saw age fifteen. Curled in a ball on the floor, wiry arms entrapping shaking knees. She has never seen the jarringly yellow walls, the ones my mother had helped me paint before she left, laughing down at me. Or me muffling screams in my butterfly-covered pillowcase; blowing my nose on lined paper, to avoid facing the aftermath of the nuclear bomb upon my world that was my mother’ s leaving. The scraps of tacky décor left on the windowsills, surrounding the gaps where the willow tree statues( that she had always said represented us) had stood, felt like the rubble left after an explosion; the new front door a barricade against her return. Against her wrecking us again. Against her holding me again. I have held myself since then, in balls on the floor of that yellow bedroom, back firm against the door.
But now, here, I don’ t have to. I reach up from the floor and let my fingertips push down on the handle, allowing the hinges to swing open and expose me. Instantly Sophie’ s compassion, and the ridiculousness of me, sitting on my floor in the dark, surrounded by ink splotches on floorboards and sad monologues written via featherquill, confronts me and I break into sniffling giggles.
‘ Yeah I’ m literally so over it,’ I chokingly laugh, tears still blurring my vision and the salt welding my mascara into clumps; as though my body’ s unquestioning instinct is to block out the world, currently manifested in the form of the landing light.‘ I just, you know, needed Taylor Swift in the dark for a few minutes …’ I feel a bit pathetic now, exposed, in the air and her sanity.
‘ Oh yeah. Clearly,’ she mocks. She is standing over me in the doorway, limp hair falling into her honeyed brown eyes, lips shaped into a supportive smirk. We are from entirely different worlds, and the fresh air and homegrown vegetables of the Welsh
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