Ginger And Yunus

Ginger lay on the sofa, her hands listlessly attached to the arch of her cranium.

She couldn't describe this feeling, the way her heart spun around in her chest like butterflies whipping around in a cage.

Or the way, her skin melted like butter everytime Yunus walked into class with his tar-colored hair which miraculously managed to stay in place, atop a luscious exotic jungle. She couldn't really describe it but she'd try through the permanent smile that licked her face like a gold-encrusted gemstone.

Her eyes would tell a different story, they would sparkle and shine as though she'd discovered the unforetold meaning of life - perhaps she had.

But, she didn't know what it was, she felt.

Ever since Holland Mayfair III banned love and intimate relations, love was a long-forgotten word, or feeling. Birth was through an inception ceremony in which five-thousand women would come together in a chamber and promptly met by a charge nurse with a small tube of semen and some eggs, the insertion process was done by a robotic tool known as a Dialator.

Some women would scream, others would lay silent, nobody enjoyed the moment but it had to be done. It was your sacred duty as a woman to promote the natality of our species.

But for now, Ginger wasn't visualizing this mandatory phase of her life. A fresh scent grew from a memory, it was Yunus' cologne. It was exotic, the fragrant aroma of pine and primordial forest with a hint of sage, lavender and some other exotic spice she couldn't quite put her finger on.

Tess had seen cases like this before. Wild young girls with words serenading the air at warped speed and tongues wagging like husky's salivating over a fresh piece of meat.

She couldn't quite recall if she ever felt this way. She probably had but her memories were hazy now, almost like the script had fazed out any ounce of her existence. She just let it be.

Tess wrote some notes on a blank piece of paper. They were odd words that she could recall later or during the session that would help her navigate this new found zest in her patient, would it mean anything after all?

Ginger helped herself up to a seated position, she crossed her legs in robotic succession as her smile was tossed with all the other emotions that she'd granted herself to let loose during this session.

The clock on the wall dwindled down to the final minutes and seconds as her session concluded.

She stood up, shook Tess's out-reached hand and diverted her gaze to the doorway that swiftly opened as the receptionist entered almost on a comical schedule.

Ginger was somewhere else. Tess wasn't sure and that challenged her to think aloud, why was she so damn happy?

This sense of comfort and tender appreciation for life was not something the therapist was content with. It was strange, and had a bizarre reproachment on her own mental journey, where it was spiralling now in the direction of wanderment.

A few days had passed, Ginger had waited for Yunus to bounce through the door with his black tussle of hair, but over the course of what seemed like an endless wave of days, nothing happened.

Ginger had gone from a girl whose skin had chaffed like thick morsels of butter melting off green beans, to ice that stayed the course.

Her smile that had glimmered earlier in the week, weakened. It was just barely holding on and she didn't know if she should attempt to pursue whatever it was she was meant to be pursuing or put a tarp over it and wait until the ikky storm had passed.

She didn't know, she hoped someone would give her a sign.

Four days passed since her epiphany with Tess. It was the day of a crucial science test on the dawn of time, one that would set her up for the rest of her school year. But she didn't care, the energy had drained from her light, she'd lost the charisma and warmth that had nourished her, and now nothing mattered beyond the next breath which by her accounts was agonisingly long.

She wanted to know why she felt like this. What was this feeling, it wasn't anger or happiness, it was something she couldn't describe when Tess asked the other day. What was it?

She was dying inside, she was lonely and empty and car on its last last few drops of gasoline. What was making her feel like this?

She started to question her own moral compass and which direction it was spinning her in. She couldn't shake the feeling that people were watching and judging her and that she may end disappearing like some other women did before her. She couldn't imagine where they went to.

There were myths though of a baby-making farm. It sounded absurd but it'd explain where the slave children came from. They were supposedly orphans whose mothers died during childbirth but there were too many of them to be a coincidence.

Yunus turned up on the fifth day, his hair had lost its bounce. His skin paler in comparison to other days, the gleam in his eye had dried up like a Saharan winter storm.

Strangely, Ginger had a new feeling. Compassion. She felt sad for Yunus and she wanted to comfort him. Was that allowed? It wasn't, that she knew but it didn't make it any less strange that she wanted to be beside him. She ached to smell his cologne and to glare into his eyes with all its wisdom and pain.

She wanted to comfort him.

Instead she watched him from across the class. The teacher was waffling on about something called the theory of a relativity, but Ginger didn't care.

She was too observant of the pain that stained Yunus' eyes. She felt his hurt, his sadness became her own, and suddenly she was not at liberty to stop it.

It consumed her. She was a passenger onboard its journey.

Yunus said nothing as he walked past Ginger in the hallway outside class. Ginger was adamant she could not give up on pursuing this feeling.

Two days went by, she was due another a session with Tess but she skipped it and waited outside general science class.

Yunus walked out with his friend Eric, a stocky quarterback with wavy blonde hair and a boyish charm that resonated through his ice blue eyes. But it wasn't Eric that Ginger was waiting for.

Ginger gathered up the courage and she lined for Yunus. She had something to ask him but she wasn't sure what, that was until she arrived in front of him, then as though it was a natural condition of her being, she knew what she wanted to say.