Nature, she thought, must possess some secret to living that people were not privy to. It seemed to Aria that the little yellow flowers, which were leading the way for the arrival of spring, were God’s way of laughing at her. In truth, Aria did not believe in God, certainly not in the way that Mrs Johnson did. But she could feel something bigger than herself, and bigger than everything, at work in the world. She just didn’t know what that was. She didn’t know so many things. She was unsure of her body, yet she was stuck in it. She seemed to be navigating her way through life with a lighthouse that remained unlit. Aria often followed these mental pathways of existential thinking to escape the world instead of to venture deeper into it. Today, she followed these mental pathways to avoid the reality of the decision she had made.

Aria had been waiting to take Clifford home until she knew that the Johnsons would be home, having finished work and picked up the younger kids from their school. She felt disheartened to realize that now when she thought of them, they felt less and less like a mother and father to her. The possibility of that ever feeling real to her was gone. Mere days had passed and already the life she had lived with them for the last three years felt like it belonged to someone else. The life she had been living on the street felt more real to her. There was more continuity in it. It felt more like where her life began and therefore, more true to who she really was. Whether she wanted that to be the case or not, there was some dark relief to be found in that belonging as opposed to always feeling like a fish in a nest of birds.

When it was time, Aria pushed through the friction of the part of herself that needed Clifford with her, the part that could not face what she was about to do. She left the sanctuary of the park and boarded the last city bus she would ever take with him. Clifford was motionless. Perhaps he has sensed what was about to happen. Perhaps the weight of Aria’s heartache had subdued him. She was saying goodbye, long before she ever actually said it. When she reached her neighborhood, she felt nostalgic. It was already a lost life. It was one more place she had never belonged, only tried to. Each house boasted only marginal differences from the others that surrounded it, as if they had all been fashioned with a cookie cutter. More so than ever before, she could feel the fakeness of this neighborhood. Like a perfectly groomed tree, it had been crafted out of someone’s vision of the great American dream. A dream where all the family problems were to be kept closed tightly behind those idyllic front doors.