(Who do you want to be remembered as?)
It’s been raining, and the girl was never the perfect student council president. She was never the top-of-the-class prodigy whose name everyone mentioned. Never the golden child who carried the sun on her shoulders, nor the kind whose voice made silence lean closer.
She wasn’t the star of the yearbook pages, but the ink smudged in the footnotes of stories, the pause before the applause, the hand unseen that folded the paper cranes.
Time questions her whether she had a dream or not.
“I don’t know,” she told Time. “Is that such a terrible thing?”
Time chuckled softly, its hands spinning forward, pulling her along.
“Perhaps not,” it said.
“But what will you tell me tomorrow, when the rain has stopped and the clouds have parted? Will you still let the world decide for you?”
She walked on,
the rain trailing her footsteps.
The question lingered,
a shadow that stretched longer with each passing day.
One day, when the rain finally stopped, she found herself standing before an empty train station, the sky a pale gray canvas overhead. Time lingered at her shoulder, silent for once, as if waiting for her answer. In her pocket was a crumpled flyer – something she had picked up in passing, an open call for storytellers in a small café across the city. It wasn’t much, just a chance to share the words she had quietly folded into herself for years. But as the train pulled in, she stepped forward, her heart a quiet drumbeat, and realized this was her answer – not a grand proclamation, not a world set aflame, but the quiet resolve to take one small step and let the story begin.
(Herself, the wilderness, she had been too afraid to name.)
–
Based on Nick Leng’s ‘Lonely Shade of Blue’
