friends – The Wednesday Society

Once upon a time there was this girl who had a delightful imagination. She was well-behaved and rather quiet, but only because the world in her head was much more alluring than what she saw around her. She never broke the rules. She was charming and never scared, not even of her idealistic thoughts. She was friendly with children because they were the only ones that found it natural to understand her whimsical nature. She collected bubblegum stickers, but only the pretty and colourful ones. She kept them in the lacy jewelry box her grandmother gave her. She loved it, but she didn’t like wearing shiny rings, not even delicate bracelets, she didn’t feel like she needed to impress anyone. She didn’t need it truly, she always made an impression with her winding ruby hair, perfectly fitted pastel dresses and lips as soft as a dragonfly’s wings.

She went to sleep at night hypnothised by the shadows on her on ceiling, thinking about how much better it would be if life were a perfect tale. She couldn’t remember the moment she closed her eyes but as soon as she did, an iridescent sky was spreading above her. She got up from the perfectly groomed grass, knocking over a porcelain tea cup that was sitting precariously close to the edge of a metal garden table with rusty paint. The white surface turned for an instant into a deep purple, just before it pourred off the table and onto her delicate sundress. She felt a passing scent of berries before she realized the lilac stain will prove rather difficult to take out from the silky fabric. She must be dreaming, surely, and this must be barely a footnote in a big dramatic chapter.

She looked up and noticed the winding street, the symetric houses painted in pure pastel colours and the personalized mailboxes that told a perfect story about their owners. It seemed like one of those places with pampered flowering hedges that you’re not allowed to touch, where you can leave the kids’ bicycle in the front yard without any worries and where dogs are too blissful to bark away at squirrels. That must be true enough, it’s a dream after all, isn’t it?

While she passed the freshly painted little white fences she thought these were the kind of people that were always respectul, that helped their neighbours fix their porch, that did their laundry on time and never fought over what cereal to buy or whose family to visit for Christmas. Oh, Christmas, just imagine the sprinkly lights covering every inch of those cozy welcoming walls. As she admired an adorable square house next to a dusty yellow dog house, she noticed a tremendous hot air ballon in the boldest, most hypnotising of colours. She barely noticed that the playground around it was as deserted as the rest of that tiny town. Surely this is meant to lead to the plot of this chapter, right?

She climbed into it without fear, she knew it couldn’t crash anyway. The colossal puffy ballon lifted softly and slowly until she could see how peaceful and perfect everything was from above. Terribly peaceful. While the playful wind made her dress rustle slighly, it became more and more obvious to her that there was genuinely no one down there; she had imagined those perfect strangers around her but there were no friends to throw her birthday parties and then forget the cake, and no family to remind her of that Easter when she ruined her fancy dress by chasing a baby possum or the summer she gave up her favourite doll for a postcard depicting a fairytale cottage lost in colourful wild flowers and a freshly painted little white fence.

Maybe that purple stain wasn’t as bad as she thought.