Functionally, Realistically

It was quiet. This quietness was strange. And it was not only the quiet; it was the stillness of everything. The apartment was clean and of minimalistic design, nothing was out of place or out of order. That is, besides the single converse sneaker hidden beneath the couch and it’s counterpart, which hid beneath the curtains that covered the clear windows on the white walls. The air was clear too, a mixture of fresh mint, a hint of dish soap, and of course the smell of smoke and wet air that blew in from the open shutters. It had just rained, and the same raindrops that created speckled masterpieces on every window, showered the concrete floor. It was Monday afternoon, and Elizabeth has just returned home from the first day of her senior year.

She surveyed her small home and exhaled a breath of immense relief. She could finally rest. She kicked off her worn rain boots and found her way to the kitchen. She picked up the last apple in the fruit basket, making a mental note to go to the grocery store. After slicing it into exactly eight equal slices, she retired to the couch and wrapped herself in her own thoughts. As she lay down, light seeped through the open curtains, showering the room with cool tones of blue and mystic shadows of flowing cumulous clouds. Days like today were Elizabeth’s favorite.

The rain, for her, had always been a symbol of renewal, growth, and change. It was cleansing. How fitting it was that it was raining at the beginning of the end: the first day of her last year.

Junior year, however, had been a blur – a mixture of studying, anxiety, tears, and a smidge of laughter and juvenile bliss. Senior year was on the road to becoming something so much more – dark and complex and altogether foreign and new. The foreign complexity was due to a number of reasons; the foremost being that the past 4 months had been characterized by death.

Elizabeth still remembered with chilling clarity the day she came home to find her aunt cold and still, lying frozen in starched sheets. Despite the overwhelming expectation that she would be grief stricken, she felt no need to meet this precedent. In fact, she disappointed it greatly. She felt no grief; she barely felt loss. This was in part due to the pragmatic way she viewed her familial relations. Since she was a child her family had continually reminded her that she was second place to everything else. For her mom, she was second place to alcohol. For her dad, drugs took precedence. To her grandparents, their goals and ideas for her life were more important than the person she was actually becoming. And to her aunt, she was just another chess piece to control, except her aunt didn’t actually want to play the game. And so, she learned to view her family, not as a place to put value or worth, but as an asset. If being with her aunt provided materialistic stability, but sacrificed emotional soundness, that was a small price to pay in order to live comfortably. In contrast, being with her mom meant more freedom, but it also meant she could not afford to live a steady life, and that many nights would be spent trying to control her mother’s long, drunken, emotional, and occasionally violent ravings. So she shifted from family member to family member, and eventually landed with her aunt: a selfish, lazy, and controlling attorney who had an obsession with small dogs and designer shoes.

Now those designer shoes were hers (the small dogs were put up for adoption shortly after her aunt’s demise). Her financial issues had been solved without her so much as lifting a finger. She had no need for her familial assets, she had income and therefore she could be on her own. The emancipation process was messy of course, but nothing more chaotic than she had already handled. And after proving her financial stability and finding a more than suitable apartment, she was her own woman.

If she were being honest, she would tell anyone that she was not ready for this responsibility, but she had a habit of forsaking what was realistic for what was functional. Functionally she was living as an independent, unattached adult; realistically she was still the same lonely and forgotten child that wanted a family. She had not discovered that child yet, and could not admit that she existed.