The Lost Summer

Thursday, July 23, 2009

She was not blessed with a sight that there was a curse to her natural honesty and direct truthfulness. She did not know that they will hold all of her point of views against her. She thought life would be as friendly and safe as a little kid’s playground. Nothing was far from the truth.

She believed that when she cleaned floors at the crappy bookstore she worked, she was laying in her best efforts. If you asked her, if she was happy, she would tell you that it was a feeling beyond that. Nothing could ever compete with that satisfaction she genuinely felt. Her superior, Mr.SS would tell her all the time, she was the best they ever had.

Then came darling EV, back from her half-completed studies of Mass Communications to help her run the store. She was the plain-face girl whose attitudes made up for that uninspiring appearance. EV darling was the friend of a long dead friend of Mr.SS. Darling EV earned her precious ‘darling’ title mostly from her ability for putting up with the constant pain in the rear area that the wiry old man would bring up to the gloom of the dusty and dark book store.

Even though, she could sometimes see through all the actions of the people around her, she chose to be a professional as she stood apart from the little soap opera that came on when EV started to roll up her sleeves for work, just as Old man SS’ shadow would form at noon along with the scent of old wood and musk.

Being professional could mean two things, either being like EV, or being like her. Nowadays, looking at the benefits, EV was the winner. But being different from EV meant that she would throw herself at a moving train before deciding to coat and glam everything up with sugar, honey and star-dust. Politeness was not a gift of being proper at the expense of her dignity.

She was not free from ill thoughts, but for some reason, she could not even get pass them. She knew that somebody had said something to somebody which was not true and was affecting the way the Old man SS was treating her. At night, she cried and in the morning, as the emotions subsided, she would rush to work, with a poker face, ready to be slammed with hellish comments about how sub-par her performance and services had become.

That day she wiped shelves, catalogued books that got sold, placed new books up on the shelves, mopped and vacuumed, polished the glass door, and built brick walls in her head. She was still building the solid brick walls when she went out to cross the street.

The black car hidden in the dark vertigo of the night zoomed straight into a figure of a petite girl, a scene that kept playing like a jammed up disc player blurry and unreal to the drunken driver. Red was the color that shook the bystanders into hysteria turning their faces white and ashy. Before long, the road was cleared up; the only evident of a tragedy was washed away by the splash of a sudden summer rain.