☾

[monafortoday]

She watched Miriam going over their small cutting garden late in the afternoon, her arms bare except for the red shawl, draped across her thin shoulders. Of course she'd run around dressed in nothing, the sunlight felt warm still and Miriam always said that the rooms were too hot for her, the rooms and quite possibly, the world as a whole. I'm too close to the sun obviously, she'd say sometimes and look at Mona in a way that suggested at least a million different things, all nuances of the same, four-letter word.

Miriam would be forty-one next year. The roses would bloom in the garden again, perhaps she'd even be tending to them, same as ever. It was a pretty picture, picture perfect, but Mona had seen the grays in her hair, how she was often too tired or (bravado aside) too cold, how her appetite was not what it used to be. They'd laughed and cried their ways through her twenties - struck a slightly warmer, more patient mood throughout her thirties - then along the way, somehow, things started changing ever so gradually, right under their noses. As if time itself had chosen to play a prank on them, the cruelest one, and even then - one of kindness.

I'll miss you, Mona thought.

And that's just how she meant it, too.