salad days
you know, when i was your age...
Sometimes in the dead of the night, she gets up to stare out of the window and onto the dimly lit streets of the city. The steel and chrome reflect the moon and fluorescent lights line the streets, mapping out the expanse of major roads and leaving the back alleys shrouded in clouds of dark.
She remembers the sun which she had hated so much when she was younger, remembers the heat, the sweat running down from her forehead and trickling onto her neck. She remembers going to the supermarket and throwing clumps of ice at each other, remembers sliding down the aisles in their socks. She remembers the sand, seeping between her toes and the water washing it away, remembers the lopsided sandcastles invaded with crabs and seashells.
She remembers his smile on the other side of the country, thinks of how it was wide and foolish, thinks of the sunlight streaming onto them as he smiled at her, and she at him. She can almost feel the water lapping at her ankles as she kicks it at him, laughing as he sputters indignantly, shrieks as he strikes back. She can almost feel the crispness of her shirts as they lay out in the blazing sun to dry, can feel the stinging of a telltale sunburn across the back of her shoulders.
She remembers the Popsicle stand, the ice melting and trailing down to her elbow as she tried to clean herself up, remembers his laughter as she swipes halfheartedly at her arm with a napkin before shrugging and tossing the useless paper into the bin and merely enjoys the cold sensation in her mouth. She remembers sitting at the counter, laughing at the bartender as she fiddled with paper umbrellas and promptly stuck one behind his ear.
She can almost taste the salty residue of the sea in her mouth.
When she shakes herself back to the present, all that greets her is the glass and steel encaging her and the sky that always seems to be tinted with gray, and she thinks of him and thinks that he can bring sunlight here, most definitely. But for now, she draws the curtains and burrows herself in the darkness that she always dreamed of and now loathed.
She curls up on the mattress without any sheets and tries to imagine it is sand she feels beneath her skin.