Ice Cream - The Nostalgic Kind

Author's Note: This is just a snippet of a novel I'm currently writing. (It's still in the rough draft process.)

The first month was cold, but it was orange. There were slight breezes, but it never reached ice-white. There was a hope, but also a lost melody. A fading time, but I still looked at the grandfather clock when I could. Except, it was mother clock, instead of a grandfather. I didn’t know my grandfather well enough, but I remembered my mother. And father. And Elise. And Alec. And Chelsea. And Sarah. Maybe one day I could reach them again, maybe they’d be waiting beneath the waves, waiting to pull me under. I’d allow them to, they could touch me.

I felt the color orange for a bit, even up until the beginning of high school. Millie, Lance, and I would spend weekends eating at a small ice cream shack in town. A lot of people went there, mainly young girls, I thought they were beautiful, they moved with a grace I couldn’t quite describe. The man that owned the business seemed quite joyful the majority of the time, perhaps it was because he was always surrounded by young women… or young girls, I should say. I hated him, every part of him down from his scruffy brown beard, to his chubby pale toes, to the glistening scar beneath his lying irises. He stood out in the night. Sometimes, you can see the deepest evil within the ticking hours, and sometimes they disguise themselves as the day. Everyone else loved him. I stayed silent where I could, and kept my memoirs in my head, and my trust over mountainous hillsides.

Sometimes, when Millie and Lance were sleeping I would sneak out the back door and stroll down the streets of this foreign land. I didn’t want to do anything heinous, just to see the world. I think the world wanted to see me too, it came alive when it did. When I breathed, the wind would shout. When I twirled, the pine trees would too. And when I ran, so did the skies and the stars, and everything in between. The stars don’t shine as much no more, but they used to back then. If you could have been there, you would believe in magic too.

If you ever come across a pavement on a hill, and if you ever tumble down it, make sure you glance up. The light from the lampposts would hit the ground and drift across the pavement until it made a circular outline. Wandering beneath them was like stepping into the spotlight, but you could always step out when ready. Every light was a reflection of myself, a petite shadow laid against the earth, surrounded in a fluorescent halo. If I stared at the beacons hard enough, they sometimes imitated the stars above. Even the night was light if you visited the universe frequently enough to know what the dark looks like. My dreams traveled often, and so did the naked Souls of my feet, all towards a singular destination.

I knew my mother wouldn’t be at the end of my journey. But sometimes I would picture her beneath the final lamppost in the middle of the cul de sac, and I’d see her long, angelic hair blowing in the bellows around. Her arms would be stretched wide, holding the universe open for me, waiting for me before she were to close it, and her smile would tug at her eyes, and make them brighter, the way that I preferred to remember them. I could live in my dreams as often as they live inside of me, if they were to allow me to.

But eventually, the lights would fade as easily as they came about. Day would come, I would drift away, and the birds would go into hiding. And mother would vanish into the whispers of the atmosphere. I wished the night would last forever, but then life would never come my way, but perhaps I would prefer that over the way things were. Reality was, and still is, oftentimes, a mere nightmare disguised as a fragile plaything. But life would always run without me, and I needed to sprint to keep up.