lotus, pt. ix

Vaelyn looks up to a familiar entrance and Kit does the same. Vaelyn lowers herself to let Kit release from her grasp, and Kit steps down to the concrete while taking Vaelyn's hand to guide her.

"Where are we?" Vaelyn asks, trying to make out the outline of the building. After a few moments, she realizes the place she stands before as she left it when the sun wasn't trying to creep behind it. In the morning of a world with a faded light beneath the clouds of demise, Vaelyn walked out of this same building. She never thought she'd be right back where she started on the same day.

"It says Daecon Medical Center," Kit answers gently, trying to read the sign the best she can as she sounds the words out under her breath. Vaelyn freezes up after hearing the words again, and Kit looks up at her. "Is this where your home is?"

"I don't know," Vaelyn whispers. She never really believed she would make it out past the concrete of this entrance. She had always kept her thoughts bouncing off the same ivory walls for years, and almost never wanted to leave. The walls heard her stories better than her friends. The lights gave her more solace than the rarity of natural sunbeams. The vents whispered bedtime stories to her as she slept.

She taught herself the art of literature as she read through a book every week, her exercise continuous by the schedule, and she felt safest when she was in such a controlled environment. Every person she ever spoke to in that place had always dreamed of leaving again, but no one ever considered what they would do once they were finally set free. After six hours beyond the glass doors of the place she once called home, she now knows what the sun feels like when it gleams hope into her skin. She has felt the blades of grass as they reach to shake her hands.

She has seen the welcoming waves of the branches, the songs of the birds, and the chatter of a million peaceful animals within the forests. In the midst of her release from a prison turned into a shelter, she tears her mind like the rough papers of her notebooks as she decides which one she belongs within. In silence, she paces towards the entrance doors again, letting go of the child's hand. She turns to the lotus, brushes her cheek, and gazes.

"I need to find that out for myself."