A New Beginning

[I] RAPIDLY CHANGING.

It was another chilly evening in San Diego, Arizona. Another evening cool yet warm. The autumn leaves flying with the wind, Sweeping through the roads and faces of people walking by. Everything looked orange and yellow. All the fresh green leaves slowly turning in bright yellow-orange colors.

As Dua, returning from the cafe, walked through her usual route on her usual time, she could smell the fresh autumn essence in the air and feel the cool breeze. As the wind delicately touched her face, she could feel her soul reviving inside. The bright orange, lit up her eyes, as they were fixed on the sunset before her. The sunset was one of the things Dua longed for, from the time she got up in the mornings until it's time came. She took a turn in her route, shifting her eyes to another scenery. She greeted Mr. Gregory, as he was sitting in his armchair, right outside his house, as always reading a newspaper. She waved her hand at Mrs. Burnings, who was watering her plants. She greeted the kids of her neighbourhood as they were playing as usual in the compound of Mrs. Graham, the grumpy old neighbour, who didn't like any kind of kid. Yet all the kids of the society always gathered around her front yard to play and make noise, and to annoy her furthermore, she smiled because she used to do the same when she was a kid.

She entered the front yard of her house, an old fashioned two story house with wooden doors and windows. Almost everything in her house was made of wood. And all the furnitures were as old as her grandmother, but her parents never bothered to make any changes in the house and her sister and she never bothered to care. She walked into her warm, lemon scented house. She could smell something burning in the kitchen and sighed at another one of her mother's failed experiment. No one knew when her mother would learn to cook properly. It had been twenty three years for her parent's marriage and yet her mother hadn't learned to cook food without burning it at least once.

"I'm home.", she announced to no one in particular and climbed the old wooden stairs up to her room. She sat down on the bed and layed there to take a short nap, relieved that the day was finally over. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the soft noise coming from her big grandfather clock that hung above her wardrobe door. Laying there on the bed she realized how simple and common her life was. A continuous process of things that happens everyday. Not a change or a shift in her everyday routine. She realized how upsetting it was, and how much she longed for change. As she lay there thinking, she made a wish, just one wish, "Please, whoever is up there listening right now, please bring at least one change in my life."

After that she didn't know how much time had passed while she just lay there on her bed, waiting for her mother to call her down for dinner. And just as if on que her mother yelled from the kitchen downstairs, calling everyone to stop all their work and come down to eat. She jumped out of the bed and went running down the stairs, she was so hungry that, even waiting to wash hands meant losing an eternity of time. Dinner wasn't amazing but she finished her food in just a couple of minutes. She got up from her seat on the dining table and after cleaning her plate, she was about to go to her room to call the night off, but her mother stopped her, "Wait don't go to sleep yet, we have an early birthday gift for you both, Duana and Clodagh."

"But my birthday isn't until tomorrow ma." She said confused, but her mother just simply smiled and said, "That's why it is an early gift, silly. Now go sit in the living room, we will be right there." Then she looked at a thin beautiful girl with deep blue eyes and dark red long hair, Dua's sister and said to her, "You too clo." Dua and clo were sitting together in the living room when their parents entered the room and sat across to them. Dua felt an emotion full with anxiety and uncertainty enter the room along with her parents. Her mother's nervous chuckle, aroused a sudden excitement inside of her and now she felt all her attention fixed on her parents.

Her mother, Ciara cleared her throat and started talking nervously, "We need to tell you both something very important. It is a truth, we have been hiding from you both all your life for your own safety. And now you both need to know that truth. We were waiting for you two, Dua and clo, to become eighteen, and tomorrow you will be. Your father and I both decided it would be a blessing in disguise but I just hope you both take the news positively and understand that what we tried to do years ago was very important and a necessity. You both have to understand that, the decision we made then is the reason you both are safe now." Dua was now really nervous and scared. What was this truth that her parents had been hiding from then for so long. Was is a bad truth and a good? Would it upset her and clo? Why would papa and ma would hide something for so long? And why would they want to tell us now and upset us? All these questions were spiralling in Dua's brains, she was impatient and restless. As if her sister had read her mind, clo said exactly the words Dua was thinking, "You're scaring us mom. I thought it was supposed to be a present for Dua. You are making it sound has if we should be worried."