They wait patiently, sometimes together, sometimes alone, for tomorrow.
For tomorrow will bring a better day. For tomorrow things will change.
They watch each day like a slow moving film strip, a series of grey identical slides revealing indecisiveness, inaction, procrastination.
But that’s okay.
There’s always tomorrow.
She wondered what he thought, walking down the hall past the sleeping bodies, the filthy kitchen, the cracked tiles, the dripping faucet. She’d told him what it was like, but it’s different when you witness it firsthand. To see how she really lived. She supposed it didn’t really matter anymore, but still, this wasn’t the image she wanted him to remember her by.
(Okay, I did cheat this week and go over fifty words, but whose counting? 
)
Georgia pulled the bread out of the oven and placed it to cool. She made bread for Danny each Friday as an after-school treat. It had been months since she baked. The bell rang at the school. Her house remained quiet. Georgia sliced the bread and ate in agonizing silence.
The path to your heart is long and in that distance loves becomes refracted and intentions scatter into nothingness. Your love is only an illusion and as I watch you disappear from my life, know this one truth – it is me who is moving away from you.
*****
I would like to send a shout out to the folks over at Postcard Poems and Prose for their feedback on a longer version of this story. Thanks Dave and Christy!
He leaves quickly, forgetting his dental records all over her torso. Incisors. Bicuspids. Remaining out back, she rolls topless in the grass. Digs a hole. Envies hermaphrodites. Masturbates in the sun.
Done, she gets up and flicks grass out of his teeth.
I grew up believing that running away was never the answer and yet I am boarding the train anyway, told I needed a fresh start. But there’s the catch with new beginnings: they are preceded by something requiring you to start over. And I know one day you’ll find me.
She yearned for kindness over companionship. Hope over security. Sincerity over love. Love, she learned, came at a cost. Love was conditional. Love was painful and secret. Love held her down.
But love also allowed her to dream of the day she would set herself free.
