The late summer breeze brought along with it the beautiful scent of death. Dying beyond the decayed leaves was soemthing stronger. More wet. Something less tangent. The life of this had never met its peak and it fizzled off with no pride. In vain, you could say. There was so much possibility there, she liked to believe.
So the need for a jacket, as she packed up her beloved old station wagon, practically brought a tear to her eyes. Wasted, she replayed in her head like a broken record. Wasted. Wasted. Wasted.
"All packed up?" Her Aunt Hattie said with moisture in her precious gem stoned eyes. Hattie had never been one for hiding emotion. But the sincerity of her quivering bottom lip made the hatred for her father flair like the beginning sparks of hot metal colliding. After all, it was his fault. Young love, deprived of its creativity. It all ended that night by the lake. And there it would stay. The grass would only hold the memory of their intertwined bodies momentarily.
So she nodded and wiped the tear on the soft cotton shirt and exhaled her last hope that he would show. Of course he wouldn't. Because he didn't know. She imagined him walking up the large front porch, knocking his familiar knock. Then Hattie would say, "I'm sorry, Sam. She thought it would be easier this way."
And his brows would burrow together in that cute way they always did when he was angry. But he would be over it, she was sure. After all, just a summer fling.
"Sage,"
Seperated from reality, she heard him call her name. Again, "Sage."
Only this call was more direct and painful.
It was then that she realized that this was no fantasy. She turned to face him slowly, carefully.
His upper lids drooped and his eyelashes speckled with moisture.
"I had to tell him." Hattie's voice mumbled in the distance, to distant from the world she had just been thrown into, with storms and heavy winds that swished her inside arounds and dizzied her brain. Where there was no stablility. She had to grab onto something or she would be drifted off into the heavy storm. She hated this world but couldn't deny the pleasure it gave her.
She had never given this new world a name. Never could she muster the words, bring them to her delicate lips and produce sound. She was to afraid by claiming a name to this unfamiliar place, the hole structure would collapse under her feet. But in the last remaining moments of togetherness they had, she had no vulnerabilty giving this place a title:
Love.