What She Wants

Sometimes she forgets what she wants.

She’ll leave a bit of it on the beach, half buried in beige wrinkled sand, forever discarded like a lost pair of sunglasses. Only when she is safe and sound, miles from the shore and waist deep in monotonous moments will she realize her chest is lighter, that there is an empty space where all her other pieces slide around and jostle for the extra leg room.

She’ll search for it, casually at first, because she must have simply left it upstairs. But then the panic grows and she tears apart the house, the yard, the car, running through each hidden crevice it could have crawled into. When the hours fold into one another and all resources have been exhausted, she crumples onto the feather bed, despondent, fear gripping her eyes because now she’ll have to live with no fire in her heart, no passion providing her drive. It is a fate worse than death and she’ll curse her forgetfulness and rue that second on the beach when she tossed one last look behind her and blinked when her sight scanned the tall, shimmering grass that held her diamond of a desire.