#opheira

She walks past the green gabled gate, head throbbing after having just arrived from the neurologist’s office. The metal creaks, iron wrought and aged from several years of non-use.

A pond sits naked, draped in seven-foot curtains of forest green, jaundiced light bouncing off the croaking frogs half-immersed in misty water. She follows a trail of cognac seeds with her eyes. Something they must’ve fed the birds, or remnants the sparrows couldn’t carry from the feeder. Her surroundings are familiar only to the child locked inside. It hasn't stepped outside in ages either. Maybe they're afraid she'd dirty up the carpets, leave half-eaten food in the sink, run grown-up adult systems like a seven-year-old. She's in the family of things, if the family of things were a memory preserved in a hidden garden with overgrown vines and wilting wisteria.

The loss of fauna is unfamiliar, still—buildings stretching past garden walls looming over like platinum giants. As if the years went whooshing by and stole the luminaries from the milieu. Nothing like the baby pictures they found on dusty bookshelves before the big move. The stove was hot when she left it, proof Hestia smirked at her, the goddess that knows her secret fear of lighting up a simple grilled cheese. It's somewhere, the inner sanctum. It hasn't been forgotten at all.

The dwindling presence of a parent makes for a colorful life. Emotions bubble up the surface in animal shapes. Something from a hen, a wild goose or a boar. Nothing close to human, garbling in shades unknown to the scale varieties they studied in Florence for a semester of classical arts. The archaeology professor had said that that particular class was important. He was a kind man with twinkling eyes and a voice that belonged either in a recording booth or next to the grim reaper, coaxing you to death.

She's interested in human feeling yet distractible. A perpetual switch between the two, leaving one neither full nor empty. Always a case of overdoing it. A need to prove she’d still be a whole vibrant person as a standalone. Perhaps a range of new colors to feel now that there isn’t an extra pair of arms wrapped around her at the headboard. She packed her bags, sold her things, left with a barely functional laptop to go backpacking. The trip started somewhere in Granada but pivoted in a hurry, circling around Gaudi architecture in the festive metropolis. A surly bloke insisted they stop for a famous brand of sauvignon blanc. Privately she thought she'd had a glimpse of the same bottle in the local store window back home anyway. They had everything there. That was the problem.