She sat on the curb where bright green blades of grass were poking out from the cracks in the concrete; they brushed against her pale, bare thighs, tickling her. She looked down at the ground with her long, stringy hair dangling all around her face, intently watching the ants and bugs crawling about on the hot asphalt. She wondered what it was like to see the world from such a strange vantage point. Cars whirred by from time-to-time, but she pretended they were never there. The sun was warm... too warm, which made her a little bit angry, to be honest. Her name was Emmaline, and she was sick of it all. She was tired and bored of everything that ever was.
Emmaline started pondering the silly things again. Those things that both inspired and saddened her. Those things that kept her from moving forward out of fear that she was not worthy of anything more than who and what she already was. She didn't know how to be anything but this, and she was comfortable this way. Sometimes when these thoughts crept in, it bothered her to the point of an overwhelming stagnant apathy. It was easy to think about the possibilities, but so much harder to take the actions needed to do something to make them happen. So instead of doing anything at all of any value, Emmaline sat and stared at the bugs and cursed the hot sun which was roasting her tender flesh.
The best and perhaps easiest way to describe her state of mind, is to say that maybe her guts and insides and bones and eyeballs and muscles and everything that made up the physical part of herself felt like icky invaders. These pieces and parts and slimy squishy things, and the hard pokey things, and the weird spirals of DNA and atoms and blood cells and enzymes were strangers to her, even though they tagged along with her all the time everywhere she went. Her thoughts were the only thing she really knew, and Emmaline just wished sometimes that she could unzip her body and crawl out for a while to get some fresh air. Maybe then she would actually get something done for once.
You see, Emmaline longed for freedom above anything else. She couldn't care less about money, and she was pretty content to hang out by herself a lot, but anything that she couldn't control... anything that made her feel claustrophobic and restrained were her enemies. Trust me, she had quite a long list of these enemies, to be sure. The list stacked up in neverending pages, one on top of the other in curls and folds and piles, with illegible scribbles all over the place that made no sense to anyone else but her.
As Emmaline sat on the curb, she decided to slip her feet out of her sandals. She poked her ruby red-tipped toenails into the dirty street. Hunks of sand and itty bits of broken glass stuck to the bottom of her calloused heels, but she really didn't care right now. She tugged at her shirt every so often as it was ill-fitting and uncomfortable, much like everything else about her life. Emmaline tugged at lots of things for this reason, hoping that adjusting something a little to the right, or a little bit down, or a little twisting of it the other way around would somehow make everything ok again, but it never worked at all, really. It was pretty ridiculous that she never seemed to grasp the idea that she could very easily simply buy a new shirt instead, then get rid of this thing that was so ill-fitting and bothersome.
The hot curb was scalding the back of her legs, leaving ugly red indentations and blotches. As much as this annoyed her, in some small way she was glad to be feeling that pain. She was glad to feel anything at all, in fact. In spite of herself, Emmaline was a hopeful girl. She always knew she was more special than anyone ever realized, and she was determined to make something important of herself. She didn't really care what anyone thought of her, but she very much cared what she thought of herself, which was the most frustrating thing of all; with nobody else to prove something to, it was far too easy to slack off and not be motivated. She sincerely wished that someone else, or something else, would push her a little bit so she didn't have to rely so much on herself because herself has proven itself to be quite unreliable indeed.
Perhaps if she plucked one of the thousands of stray dandelions out of the grass and closed her eyes so tight and squinty and clenched her fists around its stem and sent every little bit of who she was through her fingertips and into the fluffy flower, that if she wished hard enough and sincerely enough that her wish would come true. She brought her pursed lips close, then gently blew the soft, white spores into the air, where they drifted along in the breeze till they were far enough away that she could no longer see them. Do you think Emmaline's wish will come true?
