❥ - a childhood memory
It’s been...quite a while since Joy was a child. She knows how she appears - the little spark in the back of the mind, sometimes, the bubbling happiness - and she knows that, in her own way, she is perpetually a child. She never quite grows up - she wears the shell of one, sometimes, but far too many grown ups are focused on things that make them sad, on things that keep them from being happy.Joy may, in many aspects, be an adult, but grown up?
She sits in a chair and clasps her hands together and it is perhaps the stillest that she ever is, thinking on her past, back when she was still fairly young, and her face brightens a bit, that pale blue glow of hers.
“Mama - I remember my mama, vaguely, and how she would have these horrible headaches - how she’d let me take care of my younger sister and brother whenever she did.”
She’d thought they were too loud to keep in the house.
“That was the absolute best! I’d take them out to the pond a few blocks away, and we’d fish or swim - there was a tire swing, and I taught them how to hold their breath underwater so they would drown - I’d always pretend I was a fish and my sister would pretend to catch me!”
She giggled a bit, covered her lips with one hand.
“One time, my little brother tried to use a fish hook - cut me something awful--- But! In the winter, when the pond froze over, we would ice skate! I taught them how to do that, too, and they were so good at it! Sometimes we would chase each other, play tag!”
She doesn’t like winter as much anymore.
