The apartment smelled of fish and lavender. It was an odd combination, but then again that’s what the apartment was too, an odd throw-together of temporary and permanent lodgers, the floors and shelves strewn with things of people who did and didn’t yet live there. A large enough place to have in so short a time become both a prison and a refuge. A three-bedroom townhouse full of free lodgers who could not escape themselves.
Fish and lavender, depending which breath you took.
The oldest girl – though she felt the youngest, might as well have been for all the stability in life she’d managed up to that point (How had she managed to become the mature one? The most mature and the most fool. Ever such disparate titles to hold, reconcilable only by as much a bleeding heart as hers.) – shoved her book away, tossed the blanket off her lap and scrambled across the room for her laptop.
The younger girl – not so young as to deserve being called it, an older soul than she often let on unless you cried in front of her enough – looked up from her own tomb.
“Restless?”
The older girl slapped her laptop open. She waited for the wi-fi to connect, agitating. “I’ve got wanderlust, still.”
The younger girl only stared blankly, her eyes saying obvious.
The other shook her head. “No, not your kind of reckless abandon. I don’t want to go just anywhere, I want to go somewhere. I want to travel, to adventure. To have some place to go and some place to be and something to do.” The girl shut her mouth. And some one to love.
Her friend rolled her eyes. “So go somewhere.”
The girl shook her head. “It’s not that easy.”
Love and distance, uncertainty and security, loss and comfort. These things did not often mix well together.
Fish and lavender. You never knew which breath.
Quill Aquiver 