She walked across the lawn, damp and trampled by the feet of her friends, her enemies, and people she’d neither met nor ever seen in the past four years. The heat pressed against her body like a blanket, causing pearls of sweat to grow both on and beneath her gown. It was suffocating, but her attempts to free herself from it were as futile as wanting to climb out of her own skin. She took a deep breath, squinted her eyes until the wide expanse of land and sky before her was but a blur, and walked on.
It was graduation day, and the world smelled like sunshine and secrets.
Memories sprang from their hiding places, as if every step set off a nostalgic time bomb. The thin white heel of her shoe sank into the soft ground below her and she remembered dressing up for her first college party, donning a little red dress and shoes much like the ones she wore now. She’d accepted a plastic cup of lukewarm beer from a stranger, had pretended to drink it, had pretended to enjoy herself, had pretended to exist in the midst of new names and faces, books she’d never read and songs she didn’t know. There were many days and nights when she thought she was dimensionless, invisible. She didn’t even think God would notice if she jumped from the roof of a building or dove into a bottomless pool of water. She felt small and imprisoned, as if she were trapped behind glass, denied the experience of both life and death.
But the hand on her shoulder, the gentle, warm greeting was real, as was the smile that accompanied it. All of these things are what had saved her. And suddenly those painfully awkward recollections seemed unworthy of her time, and crawled quietly back into the recesses of her mind.
“How’d you find me?” she asked, her fingers lacing through his. “Everyone looks the same – slightly hungover and absolutely ridiculous in these oversized gowns.”
“It was easy,” he replied. “I stared out into this crazy sea of people and you were the first real person I saw.”
(word count: 359)
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