florence

Note: I wrote this late at night during a seven-hour car ride. To sum it up, I was bored and sleepy and tired, so I opened iA Writer on my phone and began writing. I don't know whether it's good or not, or if it's even meant to be measured on such a scale, or if it's meant for anything at all. But anyway, I hope that you enjoy it.

Seventy miles per hour. That was the most that the stationwagon was supposed to be going, but, like many things in this life, stationwagons are not known for their compliance with rules. If it could go faster, it would, and it did indeed. Ninety miles per hour, actually, was the speed its motor decided upon, regardless of whether Florence were to jump on or delicately brush the accelerator. She was alone, sitting in the driver’s seat, back locked and looking directly ahead at a pair of red lights that could easily have been a figment of her imagination. Slowly, the lights grew dimmer, until they were veiled behind a velvet curtain woven of loosely threaded fog. The erratic horizontal jerking of the stationwagon (until then a constant of the trip) eased into a floating sway, as if the tires were replaced by clouds - and where rubber would need friction and inertia to move, the clouds’ thought of going forward was enough for the ground to comply. Florence thought that she could see through the clouds for a moment, to a place beyond the night, where sunlight needed no sun to be born; it simply existed. A unicorn might have smiled - she would never know for sure - but it was just as beautiful as any horse in this land. And then the red lights gently pushed back from reality, and Florence blinked - even with her eyelids closed, she could feel the darkness wrap around her and her car, but it was not a piercing darkness, it… it was a knowing darkness. And that, she thought, might have been just what she needed. She did not feel relief, nor warmth, but an understanding was enough. To know that not everything was okay, but that someday, it might be. She blinked again; now, a silent tear dropped out of her eye. Florence plunged back into the tumultuous river of life, but this time, she dove elegantly. The lights vanished again, and a wall of rain hit her windshield. The stationwagon bounced a little as if in surprise, but carried on just the same. And, after all, Florence did too.