TOMORROW WE WILL RUN FASTER, STRETCH OUT OUR ARMS FARTHER… AND ONE FINE MORNING—
Cindy sits on the rough carpet draped over the porch stoop, legs crossed, arms tucked in, leaning forward into herself. The sun breaks over the valley shortly before lunchtime, and she squints with one eye as she watches Christopher throw the ball at the backboard standing in the driveway over and over. A giant ball and cup. The hope of a meaningful afternoon with time to herself while he stirs on the living room couch and before her husband returns to suck the air out of their home. She likes the warmth of the sunlight against her. Her pores open, she deepens her breath.
When she was young, when she married Christopher Sr., she thought her mind would change. That she’d, at some point, make the turn into adulthood and be as comfortable home with a child as her mother was before her. She’d never asked her mother if that change had ever occurred for her. In the years since she passed, Cindy wondered if her mother wasn’t as insane as she’d turned out to be, day in, day out. She wondered if her mother had learned to hide herself somewhere safe, in a movie theater or a hope chest, in romance novels, in trips to the mall. She wondered if her mother had remained 18 forever, or if she’d made that invisible light blink off under the strain of giving herself away to her daughters, to the expectations of family.
She wipes the sweat from her palms on her knees, stretches out and thinks the thin layer of moisture forming on her legs is… sexy. Would have been sexy if it mattered anymore. She would love to feel eyes on her, still. She feels no guilt. She’d love to walk upstairs and begin the ritual of beginning again. Shaving in the shower. Drying her hair. Standing in front of a mirror. Feeling awful, gorgeous, then awful again. She wants a man to buy her dinner. She wants to watch him try. She wants to smell someone new. Wants to be pressed against a bathroom wall. No part of her wants to spend the next thirty years kissing that man. Cooking these men dinner. Being where she needs to be for them, and only for them. She sits like this a long time, feeling the sun, the late May air evaporating her daydreams off of her skin, her son pounding the basketball in the background. She’s patiently desperate, and no right answer in mind but the passage of time.
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