Even though Leila was young, ever
since she first allowed the thought of becoming a writer enter her mind, she
had wondered where the perfect start to her autobiography would be. Her
childhood had been average, with a few conflicts with neighborhood kids being
the only spikes in an otherwise by-the-numbers early existence. She guessed
everything could start to take shape into something worth retelling once she
was in fourth or fifth grade and started somehow sliding down the side of the
bell curve for peer expectations. Her writing had become so prolific, yet she
was still so childish and unassuming in her manner, that it had the strange
effect of turning others away from her. And by force of trying to please, she
became an expert at pretending this didn’t bother her, which only made her seem
more stuck up to the rest of her classmates, and pushed them further away.
But now it seemed that she’d given
herself a start, right under the jagged scribble she couldn’t make out. And as
she read the entry beneath it, dated as she usually did with just day and
month, she realized she really didn’t recall any of the events being described
there. If it hadn’t been in her handwriting and using her own mannerisms,
inside jokes and stylistic choices, she would have sworn someone else had made
up the events in those pages.
The world inside her started
swimming as she reached the end of the entry. By force of her will something
like a spool of film inside a video cassette was pulling itself taut and
grinding forward against a stubborn resistance from the opposite side. If I can just make this crawl forward one
inch, the whole thing will give… I can start piecing this whole mess together…
I just need one… memory… please!
It wasn’t so much a memory as an
image in her mind which made her suddenly open her eyes and gasp. Her gesture
pulled on facial muscles that made her ache and tear up once again with equal
parts pain and joy.
A
blue dream. It all started with a jolt from coming out of a blue dream.
The events of October 24, part 1
“Again! Not again!” Leila shut her
eyes and tried to deny herself the part of lucidity that meant another early
morning of obstacle-coursing through her adolescence. Relieved as she was that
the frantic note of her dream had all but receded in the comfort of the realm
of waking life, she couldn’t now help but yearn for a conclusion to her cryptic
dream. She only remembered scraps and pieces of it, and she attempted to relax and
recall as much as possible before her mother’s wake-up call made it impossible
for her to grasp any more details.
Blue, she recalled… her favorite
color. Rich, royal blue tinted every plant and every inch of that nocturnal
landscape. She had felt very much at ease, blissfully relaxed, like that moment
had expanded outside of herself and turned into a movie set. She could feel a
breeze but perceive no sound at all. It was as if she had been waiting for
something, as if something was about to reveal itself which she both silently
wanted and didn’t expect. It was such a strange conjunction of feelings, a
yearning without hope, and yet a quiet certainty that the unspoken and that
which was not dared to be imagined was about to come about.
“What was in the water?” she found
herself mouthing the words and her teeth slightly whistled at the “s” under her
breath. She was pleasantly skirting the gray area between awake and asleep when
her mother’s urgent voice jetted through the air in her room and hit the one
brain cell that set her entire nervous system on high alert.
“Leila, it’s 6:25”.
“Well”, she thought with a rueful
sigh “there will be no more recalling after this”.
She sat upright in her bed, a
vision of frizzy black hair and puffy eyes. Leila regarded her bare, bony legs
poking out of her boxy pajama shorts. They were much paler than the tanned arms
poking out of the matching button-down pajama shirt. She hated these pajamas,
but since they were worn only for practical purposes, she dealt with them and
tried to ignore the fact that they made her look like a marshmallow man with
toothpick arms and legs. Slumping to lie on her back again was just too easy
and tempting, and as she dropped she wished she could just keep going without
much thought of where she could conceivably end up.
No good. A second mother’s call
would mean the dance of death with get-ready time. She slinked to the edge of
the bed, let her feet down and made a lengthy chore of righting herself with
her arms, inching her hands closer to her hips and pushing herself up until at
last, she achieved a sitting position.
“One small step for a girl…” she
thought, and let her hair down by unceremoniously pulling off the hair tie that
kept her dark waves out of her face while she slept, pulled in a messy, high
ponytail. Her hair slouched like punched leavened dough, settling in sad
looking clumps around her neck.
“Okay, today is Wednesday. What do
we have to look forward to this lovely hump day? Oh, yes, my History outline is
due and I’m not halfway done. I didn’t finish the Biology review. I will
continue to hate more than half the people in my class, can’t wait.”
She knew she wasn’t being fair; the
school newspaper was coming out today, and in it, her best poem so far. It
still didn’t seem to even out all the strain of her everyday routine of being
unapologetically unprepared and barely scraping by on the subjects she hated.
Leila closed her eyes again and evoked her dreams. She longed to be back in
that peaceful scene, and to be able to see what was in the water.
“Timber!” was her thought as she
dropped sideways back onto her bed. She clung to her pillow and tried to blow
some of the hair off her face, then gave up and just swatted it off with her
hand. The dream beckoned again, and Leila briefly felt the faintest spark of
recollection, a quick flash of an image in the water, but she refused to give
it too much credit, she knew she had inserted her conscious thoughts into
incomplete dreams before, and the more she tried to make the image fit, the
more she lost the true essence of the dream. Still, if she relaxed a bit more,
maybe it would come back…
“LEILA!”
She bolted from her bed to her
closet and snatched her uniform skirt so hard she bent the wire hanger and sent
it spinning clear off the rod before landing on the floor with an impatient
jangling that perfectly matched the tone in her mother’s voice.
“I’M COMING!”
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