Waiting for the Breeze
Introduction
The town, by definition, was a façade. Its semblance depicted a place where kids of well-to-do parents lightheartedly hang out in the town center and mostly receive good, private school education. People visualize it as a place that seems so isolated from reality, only attaching themselves to it through community service. But this description belies the truth. For it is not detached from reality, reality is embedded in it. It is the epitome of the Titanic, a ship that sets off, but never reaches its destination. Yet, there were survivors of the Titanic, so there will be survivors of this town.
But Maggie Byrne refused to go down with that ship and refused to merely withstand the fatal crash. The seemingly ebullient green landscape, quaint shops, and safe town center gave the feeling of impenetrability, like it could withstand any hardship, but it couldn’t, the people couldn’t. The citizens of this town where forever falling into a hole of insecurity and other issues which lead to troublesome corollaries, just like her family. She repudiated the lives of her sisters, Gillian and Ani, which played before her.
Gillian was well out of college and well into her alcoholic’s anonymous group. She had been the model student, the personification of what had seemed at the time, like success. Then she moved to the city for college. By the end of her schooling she had total academic perfection and her future lay before her, but now that that was accessible, she had no more goals but to continue. To carry on walking down the littered gray sidewalk through throngs of people under reflective glass and mundane buildings to her job as C.E.O. in a big company. But while walking through the crowds of people, street performers, and artist she realized all the things she could’ve been and all the things she didn’t perfect.
Social perfection was one. She had friends, but none she held near to her. She was liable to drive any boyfriend away as a result of her excessive work schedule and dull personality. Thus, she broke down at every small rejection pertaining to these things and drank the pain away. And eventually she drank the job away, too.
But no, Maggie refused a life like that, more than her other sister, Ani's life. She was bubbly and superficial, once had tons of friends, and the social power to discard them. Her future? She had thrown that away years ago, and now she was without the power to get that, and the friends she once had back. Maggie didn’t want to be the person to rely on looks and luck and fail when that luck ran out.
She did not want to simply be a survivor, only to go back England where she started. No, Maggie wanted to take a life boat and continue the journey, all the way to New York.
