She walked outside of the house onto the porch, hoping to escape. Bare feet pressed against warm concrete in the sun, she shut the front door quietly. Moving down the steps of the house, she stepped around broken pieces of chalk. As she walked onto the wet, sharp grass, a light breeze started. She stopped suddenly and turned to face her body against the wind. It blew harder, sucking the air of the high temperature and removing the heat from her skin. It kept going, rustling the branches and leaves of the nearby trees and bushes. Her hair was lifted up and began to swirl and move away from gravity, she closed her eyes. Then it stopped, and the heat was quickly upon her once more. She opened her eyes in disappointment and stood still for a few moments, curling her toes into the dirt. She squinted towards the sun, listening to the bees hum their merry tune, and each bird chatter to one another. A frown played across her mouth as she gazed at her hands, so she stuck them in her pockets and turned to keep walking.
After walking for a little while, she ran across a burning asphalt parking lot and to the cooler curb. Before she crossed the street, again the childish wind teased at her back and moved her shirt around. This time she ignored it before moving across the rocky road to the field. She grabbed a pair of sneakers from her back pack as the wind still persisted behind her. Slipping the old and muddy shoes on, she strode into the wheat colored weeds. They reached up to waist and snagged her shorts, the wind rushed through them, and it gave the allusion that they were whispering to her. Quiet quotes and phrases from the day, mimicking her teachers and friends. Friends... The word made her angry, she snatched up a hand full of the weeds, wrenching them from the ground. For a moment the whispers stopped, and she was saddened, and she dropped her hand full. She turned to the direction of her high school, where lies and deception lurked in every hall way. A wave of hatred over took her, she hated those people who made her believe in love, yet abandoned her the moment they were released from the walls that held them inside.
The wind then picked up. She turned around once more, half expecting it to be grinning playfully at her. She sighed as she realized that the wind was only wind, no figment of happiness was there. But as she stood there, the whispers turned to screams as the wind blew harder then ever. Fear skipped across her chest, daring her to move. Soon the air whipped around her body, her hair thrashed about her face, smacking her face. Then it was hard enough that she fell backwards, the screams faded into a silence of mercilessness. Dirt flew into her eyes, covering her face, she tucked her knees to her chest. She was scared, and her breathing was harsh, and the longer she sat there the more the fear in her heart tormented her, taunting her imagination.
After some time the atmosphere faded into a soft rhythm. Cautiously, she lifted her face from her body. She gasped and felt her stomach drop.
There was nothing.
It was blank. A pure white surrounded her. There was no line to differentiate the ground from the sky, the walls from the corners. It was like being in a white sphere with no direction. The wind had erased everything. It had erased the place that held her pain, sadness, misery and despair. But it had come with a cost, it had also erased the things that had brought her joy, her family and music. She felt absurd, and some deep place in her knew these things would not return. She felt surprisingly emotionless and did not know what to do with herself, so she moved forward in the strange, pale mirage.
She walked for what seemed like hours in every direction, soon she closed her eyes and paced about, though she never stumbled, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Eventually, she sat down out of boredom, and picked the mud off her shoes, as it flaked off and hit the white, it disappeared. She stared at the spot in which the white had seemed to absorb the dirt. She slowly repeated the action, and the exact same thing happened. She felt that same pit in her stomach from earlier and she laid back, thinking sorrowfully of her family. Turning over on her side something caught her off guard. In the spot where the mud had evaporated, a thick black marker had emerged. Warily, she grabbed it and blankly looked at the object. She bit her lip in curiosity, and pressed the thick tip to the floor. She drew a simple flower, and unlike the dirt, it stayed for a moment. She smiled and was about to draw more before her picture slowly faded. She felt exasperated and was close to tears until a real flower grew right there from the ground. Startled, she scooted away. She gaped at the creation in amazement. After a minute, she reached out and felt the velvety petal. An idea grabbed her brain, she picked up the marker once more, and drew some grass around the flower. Soon enough, real grass appeared.
This made her heart jump and she began to draw everything she could think of. She drew her house and created a new neighborhood for it. When the houses were finished, she filled them with pretty people, and as she finished her picture in her own house, she squealed with joy as her own family appeared before her. She could touch them and talk to them, and for awhile she was very happy, as she completed her very own, perfect world. As time wore on, the marker never died, but she came to realized how everyone whom she was surrounded by had an emptiness in them. In the utopia she had worked so hard to find, there was no true happiness, and she began to realize that everything that had appeared was there physically, but not mentally. It was all merely parts of her imagination come to life, they were not real. She had gotten what she wanted, a place where she could grow up happy. But instead she had created a blank world. A world where she existed neither happy nor sad.
She merely, existed.
"You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that actually means something."
- Harold S. Kushner
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