Flash fiction from my very first reading.
Dreams often end before they even begin and a dream about love can’t be real if it’s never true. Even lying in bed with a boy, Amy knew their romance only happened behind her closed eyelids, nestled deep within her subconscious, and would never exist outside her mind. History and circumstances were the only unwavering pair in her life, and their weight sank her hopes of romance the second ships began to sail.
The boy, José, had messaged her some half apology for the silent weekend. In her response, she glazed over her ache and accepted his invitation. Waiting for his words was the last immature part of her, she decided. A grown woman would be unfazed by temporary people but she still wanted to be desired and praised. José did her that favor.
“Don’t go to work today,” he mumbled as he tossed his arm limply over her, his morning breath striking her nose. She rolled her eyes and then her whole body away from him.
“I don’t have the same freedoms you do,” she said as she stood into her sweats that were in the same position they had fallen into the night before.
“You’re too serious, Amy.” Each of his syllables annoyed her.
“Right ok,” she called over her shoulder, fully clothed and out the door.
Later, at her white ikea desk, in her eery open-concept start-up office, she stared at the flood in her inbox. But really she was distracted by what was just in front of it. Her reflection, smudged by dirty fingerprints, glared right back. She looked tired.
Despite the exhausting cycle of her romantic life she kept moving forward; because often what lies behind you is much worse. She refused to recreate the wreckage of her childhood home. Holding on to trauma was the second to last immature part of her, she revised. A grown woman would make her own decisions without history poisoning her. But she couldn’t help being reminded of her parents and their big empty house every time she opened the door.
Amy saw those memories in the bags under her eyes and her lack of interest in material things. She saw them in her dedication to her career and her early sprouts of gray hair. But she refused to let them surface in her relationships. She would never truly love a man because he would never be able to care for her. So she decided, as she decided many other things for herself, that love would stay trapped in her mind and never make its way out of her dreams.
A ping that sounded like a sharp white light, erupted from her computer. In the top right corner, the message the sound was announcing appeared. She drew her eyes away from their blurry reflection. José had said, come again tonight. A question without punctuation became a command. After no hesitation, she opened it, deliberated over a laid-back response, then let her blue bubble sail. Sure. It read; the emphatic period starting the cycle all over again.
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