Millie Mulligan

There but for fortune...

Millie Mulligan was chasing the moon-dog when we came upon her, a wild child for sure we saw as we spied on her from the rocks.

We’d been lost in our thoughts for far too long and had decided to take a beach walk to clear them.

She’d always seemed so far out of reach to us and so we studied her from afar.

We’d already made one boo-boo when we’d looked at her in class and it turned into a stare that her friends pointed out and she took exception to it and had stood up then and stared us down.

We woke up from that the joke of the class and so shrunk away into our-self. We’d made a mistake that we wouldn’t make again; but we couldn’t help liking her; she fascinated us with her hair so dark and long and her eyes so bright and full of life and we could see she was fun to be with, always surrounded by her admiring friends, and bright, the head of the class, easily answering questions and able to learn so quick she was astonishing.

We on the other hand spent our time at the back of the class lost inside our-self and often relegated to the dunces corner for not forthcoming with the correct answers when asked, perhaps because when the spotlight was on us we froze up and lowered our head and mumbled anything to get the attention away from us for fear of being laughed at again, and in this way we became the weird one and untouchable except to be laughed at, ridiculed and bullied in the playground.
So we lived in our own world and were left to it and the prognosis was that we would never amount to anything.

And now looking back over a very long life we see they were right for we’ve spent it alone with our own thoughts for company, wandering from one place to another until just recently when we came back to our childhood town and moved into the deceased mother’s ramshackle house by the sea.

Now we were both old and we wondered what her life had been like and if it had been good to her as we spied on her once again from the rocks by the sea with the surf forever kissing the sand of the shore and the gulls above crying their age old song of hunger.

As she came close to pass by where we hid we could see on her face the lines that showed a life of laughter and joy and a lightness of being only angels know. Her hair was white now but we could see she was still fun to be with, that even alone she was enjoying life with the wind playing with her hair and the sun dancing with her being.

The sand caressed her bare feet, only one set of footprints going back along the beach, until she came to mine and following them with her eyes to the rocks where we hid we finally met again and she caught me again staring at her and again she faced me and stared hard into my eyes and we saw that she recognised us. She remembered us.

Our heart quickened, for we were caught.

“What are you doing hiding there?” she asked.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” We replied.

Image from Pixabay

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