But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered ‘different.’ She did not suffer too much.
There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it’s flashing glory.
Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.
Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.
But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.
They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.
They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering Wes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.
But she didn’t want to recall things. She wanted to live things — or as a compromise, relive rather than reminisce.
Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
She sat in the sunshine watching the life on the street and guarding within herself, her own mystery of life.