I. Winter Wonderland
There's a dream she always has – a premonition, really – when she knows it will snow. Her mother is in it, of course – her mother is in all of her dreams, and nightmares, too – with her father, an obese Garret, an effeminate Seely (in a pink dress, no less), and one other person – a person with no face, a person she can't name. The six of them are on vacation in Vermont, skiing alone on the bunny slopes. All five people glide down the white blanket of snow (Garret is struggling a bit, and Seely is stumbling over the bottom of his dress) while she hovers above, sitting patiently (alone) on a ski lift: watching with as much glee and satisfaction as a child does on Christmas morning. A child, she is – pigtails, missing teeth, and all – and she feels a strange content, sitting there: watching as her mother; the best skier of them all; navigates through every hole and crevice she encounters, leaving all of her friends to steer themselves through the perfect, circular flecks of chilled dust that she leaves in her path. This is her mother, Jordan thinks to herself: headstrong, motivated, and haplessly perfect, in everything that she does.
In the midst of her ingenuous admiration – the simple, wholehearted devotion and love that she feels – the unwelcome stranger appears beside her mother, and without a second's hesitation, she disappears. Jordan frantically searches for her, her round, imploring eyes searching every patch of white for a glimpse of her mother, continuing her descent with a contented smile written on her lips, reassuring her anxious, fretful daughter that she is still here, that she is still skiing, that she is still making her way down the path without one obstacle in her way.
But she doesn't. In fact, all Jordan can see is an incomprehensible blur gliding in her place, navigating the path with the same success of her mother, but without the confidence, without the beauty, without the perfection.
Jordan struggles to climb off of the lift; her bony, shapeless legs attempting to lower themselves to the ground; but she can't, she can't move, she can't scream, she can't hear. All she can do is see – she is watching a movie with no sound, a movie with no ending, a tragedy with no color – because all that was bright has disappeared and she doesn't know how to bring it back again. Instead, she is trapped in the theater, in an audience of one, and she looks away from the harsh, ugly black and white images that surround and suffocate her. Now she is moving, twirling, spinning; now she is lost.
Distressed, she looks to the others for help. Surely they must do something – "Jordan, I'm always here for you" – how many times has she heard that? Her father carries that same weary expression that he has had ever since that day when she was eleven, coming home from school with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk and a dead mother waiting for her. Garret is still struggling (maybe he should have bought a bigger ski suit) and Seely keeps tripping (maybe he should have just bought a ski suit) and she just can't move – none of them can move, they are all paralyzed without her.
And when she wakes in the morning; her skin tingling with faded, odorless sweat and her hair frizzy; she knows that there will be a blank, white blanket laid out for her over the streets of Boston. She will pause for a moment, envision herself on that slope, side by side with her mother (as it should be) but then she hears her alarm clock wail and her cell phone ring and she remembers that if everything was as it should be she wouldn't be paralyzed, she wouldn't be stuck, and she wouldn't always have to try so damn hard to move absolutely nowhere.
A/N: This is a response to the Coffeerooms Fanfiction 2005 Challenge. It will be a multi-chapter fic, and I will post more ONLY if I recieve some feedback. The title comes from a Bright Eyes song (thank you, Conor Oberst.) Keep reading!