The women in my life, pt. 3

Maia, now 23, slapdashes towards the gate where she had assumed the scarf she had fell off while hanging on her shoulder. There was nothing there but the brusque wailing of the arid land. She stood there disappointed for a minute or two before she decides to call her friend Jake, who is waiting for her at a café they frequent to to grab coffee. She tells him she no longer was in the mood to meet and drops the call before he could even get a single word out. She walks away with her feet stamping at every step. She starts shedding some tears with a frown, and looks at everything around her with a cursive tantrum.

She arrives home, tears dried on its own. Her mother looks at her with only a slight hesitation. She knew.

"It's just a th--"

"Don't," Maia interjects.

"I won't say anything else then, only that Jake called." Maia was already gone, locked up in her own space wherein she was alone with her thoughts.

Mati comes out of the kitchen and asks her mother, "Was that Maia?" She smiled and understood each other. "It's just a scarf."

"Let her grieve," their mother eventually mutters. "It was important to her because it was important to me, as it should have been for you, too."

"It wasn't that important to you. I would know, because I know you."

"Well, that's true," she spins an apple in her hand. "You have to allow her to be who she is. Unlike us both."

"She is not who she is. She is exactly who we both think she is."

Her mother sighs, nostalgic with a callous thought. "I know."

And within her room, Maia schemes on how to get the scarf back. Should she buy a new one? Should she knit it herself? Should she rummage through her mother's hand-me-downs to find a replacement? The questions continue to plague her mind, but with vigour and determination, she was eager to succeed. In her panic she smashed a small cabinet door with a pencil, breaking it in half, beneath the table where her everyday normal things usually are. She smashes a door she barely uses wide open, and in it finds two golden rings made of diamonds. She stares at it intently, and for the rest of the day forgets about the scarf.

She is then overcome by the selfsame sentimental emotions she once held before she had the scarf. She feels herself weighted by the sadness that once lifted her off the ground, and this gesture filled her heart with an odd feeling of warmth and joy. She sheds another tear, but compared to the last, this time is of pure bliss.