I sat here listening to some Dylan and needed to write this. I have no idea how it reads, but I felt compelled-it's a beautiful lyric:
She looked across the table into a pair of eyes that were often the point of comparison for her own. The woman belonged to the confines of time: dated like an antique, and yet, fit well within the puzzle of the present. The two women conversed for a while, of what would soon be forgotten. For the morning sun would soon be rising, and so, just as before, her mother was gone. Leaving Elizabeth to gamble on another night.
These dreams always left her with great happiness in the haze of the morning. For a moment, the warmth of her most comforting dream extinguished her lasting nightmare. For a moment, the hope of holding her parents again was rekindled and the search of finding them, back on. For a moment, she was whole.
It didn't take long, it never did, for her happiness to wither away with the cold, black winds of reality. Striped, of the thin veil of comfort, she was yet herself again-fused together by what remained and void of something she could never have.
In these moments, when her mind lost her abstract thoughts, she was fifteen. She was the fifteen-year-old who wandered through the rest of her life, on that first lonesome night. She stared into a space that was both vast and empty, watching as milestones rolled by-grappling with the understanding that they would no longer be a part. Graduations, weddings, children, those once happy visions having to be redrawn to comply with their distortion.
Needing to get ready, however, Elizabeth settled her thoughts back in her mind, and moved on, as she did, most of the time.