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The Silver Skies of Spring

A letter to explain it all

By Anya Léa TilleyPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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The Silver Skies of Spring
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Dear Mother,

It has been months since we last spoke. I have heard over the years your disappointment, in me, in the two of us, in everything that has ever defined what kept us attached to one another. I write today the details of what I have already done. I wish for you to understand, I dare to demand that you accept.

Let me say first that I have loved you, and still do. For every fiber of my being commands me to run back to you and be by your side, hold your hand and tell you I will remain yours forever. Yours, your thing, what you wished so eagerly to enforce I would come to enjoy and celebrate. I do not, I have died so often and somehow have risen from the ashes my soul has been turned into every time. Every time a little less attached, I have lost myself, in all of your stories, and each of your fantasies. For your orders have been nothing but fantasies. Mother, for you to believe I should be kept from the world, like a bird whose wings have been clipped to prevent it from flying; how was I to allow it? And yet I did. Time and again, I did. I believed you, I saw the world as you depicted it. The somber horizon I was to find, should I have been bold enough to open the door. The windows of your home never spoke the truth, lies were painted all over them, and my fear grew with each step of yours I heard, walking the corridor leading to my room.

My room, the thick velvet of the chair and the dusty worn out carpet, how comforting it has been and may always be. But I have to desire to ever return to it, the prison it has been; my back is turned to it and will not see it again. As grand was the fantastic world invented in my mind within its walls, every part of me aches to the thought of ever feeling the abandon and loneliness I had wrapped myself in, a blanket embroidered of agony with a thread of despair.

I ventured out of this room, the fear pounding loud in my head like a drum in the middle of a storm. Driven by nothing but the certitude that, should there be no outside world, as you so vehemently imagined it, I was going to create it.

You were asleep, and must have omitted to lock my door, as you normally do. My instincts told me to search for the keys that never leave the ribbon attached to your wrist, but perhaps they were to be found in your coat pockets, on a hook near the portrait of an old man walking on a windy road by the sea, maybe in one of the drawers in the kitchen. No, they were left carelessly on the coffee table, next to a tin box I had never seen before, resting a little black book. Next I found myself shameless and filled with a desire to know more about you, sure that there was an infinite realm you existed in while I didn’t.

There were names in your booklet and they seemed like nonsense at first, a mere list of women you could not have known, never had you had much visitors, seldom a merchant or a preacher would come by for a short lived welcome. But reading through the list, and noticing the numbers beside them, I recognized them, one after the other: Josephine, Elonora, Madeleine, and so on… ; so many names I would not even have thought there had been so many? The only things I had ever possessed, my dolls, my precious porcelain dolls! Offered to me in my earlier years, and at once taken back. I was seventeen, about two years ago when you had declared them a folly that I sure had no more use for. How ridicule they were anyways? How frivolous and vain! You had taken them away. In the metal case, I have found the money, and having had time now to peruse through both items, I realized you had managed to sell all of them. They were precious, indeed, a few dollars close to twenty thousand dollars you have obtained for them.

I return with this letter what is yours, the booklet in which you diligently monetized little fragments of my fragile past, artifacts that had been taken away from me anyways; and a tin case, empty. Empty of the money but full of hope, I have left the building that was your house, which for too long has served me as a cage. I have left it and used some of the money: a dress, shoes, and the first payment to an apartment I will not indicate the address of on the present letter’s envelope. Bus fares, some food, the dollars have been scattered already slowly around this city I had previously never heard of, and I am grateful to discover. Careful expenses have been planned now and I want to thank you for this chance that you did not willingly give me. I have created the world, and am relishing in the learning of new things every day. A bicycle, books, knowledge, the silver skies of spring; the snow is melting and some flowers are poking through the ground, they too want to find the outside world, they want to create it of a thousand colors.

To be well is what I want for you. For now this is good bye, I have not finished creating my infinite world and this task may never come to an end. The emptiness of the place I once had in your realm presses on me the weight of your reality; the amount found will be used to reinvent myself with lightness.

Good bye for now.

Your daughter, with love,

Alice

literature
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About the Creator

Anya Léa Tilley

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