She was waiting for someting good. Something beautiful and sharp, like a rocket blasted into her dull, bland life. She had fooled herself into thinking it was today, that today was liftoff. She was young. She could still fool herself like that.
It was dark that day, the sun held captive by the clouds. As she walked outsde, it happened, alsmost as if the air shivered around her. She stepped back, amazed. It was the feeling she'd gotten only a few times before, when a song or a man's eyes had suddenly jumped into existence. She noticed the flowers, drooping and nearly dead at the end of summer. She saw the dull, well-trodden sidewalk in front of her, reminding her of the trivial tasks of the day. She saw the people at the corner, chattering in their old, tired, rhythm. And she smiled, thinking the words she'd waited her whole life to hear: she was the rocket! She was to rise, fierosiously beautiful, impailing tedium andboredom with spear-like elegance, the inspiration and joy of her flight causing so much awe and fear below. For a moment her heart soared with the thought of it, but her cowardice soon dragged her to the ground. She could have cried, as her mind critically looked her up and down. Her plain clothes, perfectly average, neatly ironed the night before. Her eyes, tired and sunken. her cheeks, eerily pale, deviod of makeup or color. And then the hardest part: she looked into her sould, the very essence of her being. She found so much good there--and so much bad. She was selfish, her greed tightly clutching all the good in her heart, afraid to let it show through, lest someone shoot it down. Her cowardice, her greatest foe, sabatoging her every time. of course she could never do anything great; she was too little, tooweak, too inferior to become the majestic beauty she wanted to be. How many times had she had this onverstaion in her head? but today, today was different. She had fooled herself well. She had woken up and believed that today it would happen. Now she had the answer, her goal, her meaning, and she knew that it had happened. Quietly as she glowed from within, she walked the length of the dull, brey sidewalk, and began her ascent.
--by allison b.
