She's imagining another world in her mind, but she can barely hold on to the interwoven threads that she is weaving into a quilt of warm fantasy. The girl is distracted by the world around her. The air inside of her dark closet, isolating her from reality, can barely stand against the howls and thunderclaps of a cold front moving in from the North.
Wood snaps and nails creak under the wind as bright flashes of light make their way in from under the door. This is her parents' house. It isn't hers. It never was. She's an unfortunate and unwilling tenant. But right now she has escaped into her inner sanctuary, her shrine to Arnold, at twelve midnight on a Saturday.
She reads a volume of her poetry from ten years ago; she's nineteen. She was nine then, in the fourth grade. Overly dramatic prose and poetry, the words of her youth, flicker under the candle light. They're so vivid to her that she can remember when she wrote them in that same spot, under a different candle and a more youthful shrine that is now just a picture on the wall. It has only a few relics in jars and boxes that she managed to save when her mother threw everything else out in a fit of hangover induced nest cleaning.
Helga knows she'll never be truly free here, so she bides her time in community college and a job at her father's store, which she is surprisingly good at. But none of that matters now, as another bolt of thunder claps, and the gale blows through the old house.
She reads the words of her pre-teen self, an introspective a decade in the making.
They are the thoughts of a once-immortal being, speaking with only a basic understanding of mortality. She cracks a small smile on her lips, as her words cry out for Arnold. Had she known ten years ago, that Arnold would find his parents at age fifteen and leave Hillwood never to return, would the words be different? Would she have fought harder to win a chance to feel his embrace, while ignoring the demon inside of her that told her to stay back, that she wasn't good enough for her living god?
Not enough, to sleep within his arms and wear his sweater in the morning?
There are cooler currents blowing outside now than there were before. The boards rattle and strain, their nails are rusted and worn, trying to hold on like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders.
The screams of the world win out and she looks up at the picture, and the swooning voice of her youth fades away in the thunder outside, and the shadows are restless as the candle flame dances in the air currents, disturbed by Helga as she shuffles her feet around and adjusts the pink hood of her worn out old jacket.
He's never coming back.
She realized that even at the airport on the day of Arnold's departure, when Gerald Johansen placed a hand on her shoulder and whispered words that she will never forget. "He loves you, you know."
The world will burn out like a dying ember, or it will be engulfed by the growing sun.
Her body will wither and die like a single wilted flower.
Her shrine will wash away in the flood.
The ice storm will never stop and this time will pass in the blink of an eye.
And yet…
As she looks at his picture, his eyes forever looking back at her…
…She's smiling.