A Year in Review
Winter was her time to breathe in reprieve. Everyone always commented about how the fall was too short - for Bobbie it was too long and her least favorite season of all. Once the world had finished it’s decay to it’s winter bones, it felt a quieter place. Everything slows down with the Earth’s rotation and brings frigid death to the year passing. And what better way to send it off than in lights, streamers and with everyone chanting away it’s final seconds?
Standing alone with a freshly cut and decorated pine, it’s white lights blinking softly and bathing a warm glow unto her - she thinks good riddance to twenty-twenty one. A year which she spent the better half of staring at reinforced cement walls. Pacing the small eight by eight patch of floor like the caged animal she was. Trying to tell herself just six more months. Six more months and she would have that clean slate people talked about. The second chance people begged for at night. Her sentence could’ve been a hell of a lot longer, she could’ve been in here the rest of her life if they had the proof to back it up. She just hoped her release date would come sooner than the impending fracture of her psyche.
It didn’t. Once her release date came, they threw her out with clipped wings and partially malnourished. Freedom turned out to have a lonely view. Trying to fall back into her old self, Bobbie came to realize that she didn’t fit the mold anymore. Something was different, something that wasn’t there before and though as quietly and subtly as it was when it’d woven into her fabrics, it became known in her head. No amount of alcohol or recreational use helped in her efforts to pick up where she’d left off and for the first time in her life she was truly scared. In her desperation for answers it only made it worse; learning just how far the statistics for people like her were stacked against her. Forcing her to take a good, long hard look at the road she was coming down and what laid ahead. She was already fighting the odds, miraculously outliving the statistics by making it to her thirties but on the other edge of the sword it wasn’t likely she’d see another decade. What could she say, she panicked at the thought. Bringing her eyes to a close, Bobbie knew she wanted to go out with more than just repeated years of what she’d grown to regret. She wanted to do things she hadn’t yet. She wanted to feel things she’d been denied and she had a lot of feeling to do. Her eyes closed to the lights’ hypnotic dance, banishing the warmth from them to stop the degrading tears before they could form.
