'...the marigold light setting the hazel forest of his eyes on fire. It was selfish of him really, to take something she loved so dearly as the woods and complicate it with... with them.'
The Avonlea Class of 1898- heading towards futures far away f...
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Diana-
Diana had heard Anne talk, in the past, about how no bed gives you a better night sleep than the one you grew up in.
That particular evening months ago, Diana watched through her periphery the red bunches of hair hang over the side of the bed, as the girl under them reminisced about her distant Gable Room. It was common circumstance they both found themselves in in the early days of Queens- the two of them alone in the dorm room, Anne talking or reading to her as Diana would sit and watch the candle burn lower, and her fingers grow more and more tired of knitting.
Smiling, Diana agreed to the sentiment. Although she never slept soundlessly at the Barry's, at least she caught more hours at home than there in Charlottetown. There was always something- either the sounds of the girls' breathing, or the thought of Anne alone in the Library, and if not for that then the hard bedframe that felt like rocks sprouting roots, tunnelling through her back. Darkness there was long, and unchanging.
Except for one night, the smell of ink and candle smoke, the singular time she felt guarded by the roots and cushioned by the rocks. She was laying next to Phil. Cobalt eyes found burnt bronze ones in the dark, and her breathing became steady. After truth and lies hung together under a promise, the fall of her Phil's eyelids made her feel like she could sleep too. She knew comfort in darkness for the first time since leaving her bed at home.
Before that night she had believed Anne. Soaked in her words, that the only way to rest well was to go back, to surround yourself in the known, in the past. As if you're protecting the faltering light from a lantern, holding it in close to your chest. Navigate the world by the same lens- the safety of consistency.
By that notion, she found herself staring down the four poster bed, in strange house in Toronto, worlds away from anything she knew, with a firm sense of dread. She guessed she'd learn every line of the ceiling; grow accustom to every sound that echoes through the walls; have recounted the past day in her mind a dozen times, all by morning. She had certain expectations of how the next seven hours would go.
But it was all uprooted.
Anne-
(play song xx)
She allowed herself a moment to wallow in the sincerity of it all. A sensitive scene that did not strain or kick under her relentless watch. It simply, humbly, existed- in the same way it always had. Eyes fell over the sloping floors, danced with the clumsy thrill of a child, across and over each component of the Gable Room. This morning, she felt she could embrace it without reluctance. The room breathed with a suspended coolness, sourced from the window. Now the chain of air fed the space between the desk and bed frame, finding the dried flower petals that had gathered there. Colours faded, enriched fire red sinks into a state of clouded brown. Leaves shrink into themselves, thin skeleton exposed and skin splitting.
