The sun

The child stands on the pavement with a green ball tightly gripped, the sun illuminates her small character, and a small, blurry, light surrounds her form. The orange light combines with her brown hair, creating a head of gold. A man passes by her, and her piety temporarily disappears, leaving a pale girl standing on her own. When the light returns to her, she has the vibrance and warmth to attract small insects to swarm around her, curiously fly close to inspect this peculiar little person.

The wind carries some of these bugs up to the window, and they hurriedly fly away from myself, not curious of me as they were to the girl. If she were aware of me, she would’ve thought about the time we met in the hallway outside my apartment. The ball rolled to my feet when I closed the door to my apartment, and she had suddenly halted a metre in front of me, either staring at the ball, or at my feet. I softly kicked the ball to her, and she grabbed it, hastily looked at me, and ran down the stairs. I saw her outside, kicking the ball against a wall.

She stands completely still, looking across the street, waiting patiently for her mother. I meet the pair on my way out of the building. I greet the mother, and the child looks at me intently, a superior being investigating a surprising and unknown presence.

“And who are you?” she asks me.

“I am so and so. I live in that apartment.”

“And where are you from?” she asks me.

“I am from here and there.”

She accepts my answers and allows me to pass.

By the time I return to the building the sun and its magical hues have passed on, but the magical little girl sits in the staircase. She doesn’t say anything when I walk past her.

“Isn’t it a little late for you to be awake?”

She shakes her head, still doesn’t look at me, she resumes quickly to her posture, not moving in the slightest. I hear the shuffling and mumbling from her apartment, the scraping of chair legs and heavy furniture against the wood. When the distinct sound of glass breaking cuts through the air, the little statue flinches a little and quickly readjusts herself on the cold step. She is a statue of stone, sitting in the cold air of a hallway made of cheap stone tiles, a little decoration to the desolate architecture.

I sit down on the cold step next to her and hand her my jacket. She shakes her head quickly, and I place the jacket between us. She stares ahead, out through the window of the front door, waiting for the golden shower to return to her. She’ll sit here, as she has often done before, in silence and with patience for hours until the small square to the outside brightens. Then, she’ll go back inside of her home, where neither her parents nor her siblings would have searched for her, if she had hidden inside the closet or underneath the bed, and she’ll put herself to bed under the streams of light.

This little vampiric creature sits here, now, in the light of electricity, displeased by the lack of nature behind the light. When years has passed, and she has been forced by the schedule of the world around her to constrain her odd sleeping habits, she’ll on an odd night go out and patiently wait for the sunrise, and she’ll think of those times when I sat next to her in the staircase of an apartment complex inhabited by vile creatures, and she’ll correct her own thought, that I was not a vile creature, but rather a silent friend to her own silence.

I’ve spoken to her mother on scattered occasions, she’s unusually young for a mother, and she works at a school, the name of which I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember what she teaches, but I know that all of her four children go to that school. As she spends all of her time surrounded by children, it might be easy to let one of them slip her mind once and again, allowing the little girl to escape out of the nest at nights such as this. However irresponsible it may seem, it is understandable, and as I and the sun watch over the girl, I don’t see any particular issue with the unspoken arrangement. Perhaps the mother knows, and perhaps she’s been keeping watch over the both of us.

The youngest of her children keeps me company after I come home from work, where I am kept away from the shine, what this child adores. The light comforts her into sleep, and the light I only see in her face. What she sees in the sun I will never figure out, and she will never tell me, it is her own secret and her own joy, it wouldn’t be right of me to demand a share of that joy.

“Look, there it is.”

I either mumble to her, or to myself, but she already knows, and as the square turns light blue, she drags her feet over the stone plates and disappear with the loud closing of the door. She’ll go to sleep under the sunshine, and I will return to work in the meanwhile. When I get back the sun will be setting, and the orange glow, carefully laid upon the girl, will ensure that the girl is safe and happy until then. Just as she trusts the sun, I will trust it, and I will look upon the hues of yellow, red, and orange and see the same thing that she does, but I will not understand it the same. Her world is lit up by a completely different sun than mine, the sun she understands and adores is not the one I witness, and I find it pleasant that our worlds will meet just before sunrise, and then part again.