And as I was moving, I started to sing like a free bird, amazed by the sound of my voice returning and flowing out of my mouth.
Her attention was drawn to a piece of paper on the table she left the night before, unfinished. Her mother suggested she wrote the family story. That was years ago. She never did, till yesterday. The memory of a dream suddenly came back: an empty room, a door half-open, and a huge wave coming through with the tide. It used to wake her up in terror, as only nightmares can do. This gigantic wave overpowering her. This time it was the memory itself, no longer the experience, that was driving her towards a new shore. Maybe it was ... who knows? The shadow of a controlling mother she was trying to escape? She recalled that day at the beach, happily swimming in a stormy sea. What once overcome her, she could face now, or so she thought. And yet here she was, stuck again. That piece of writing was a reminder of that. There was something she pencilled in that piece of paper that she was too afraid to read aloud. She was just tired now, ready to sleep. Perhaps, tonight, she could dream again. At first, I thought it was all a misunderstanding . “He said this, I said that, and then it went on and on ... But how did it start? Hard to say”. She started to look outside the window and stared at the horizon - the same landscape she had always seen, every morning, every day of her life. “How could it be seen differently?”. It felt unequivocable; indeed, she could not make him see her side, and equally she could not see his side, and vice versa. The sun was rising, and she was still looking outside the window. She looked up: a bird came through, flying high in the sky. “Here is something different from the usual, the same old, same old I’d seen every day of my life”, she thought. Then she looked down: a mother with a baby were walking quietly on the street, beneath the trees. The baby looked up and captured her gaze; she smiled. They smiled at each other for a few seconds, and it felt like forever. Now she knew how a misunderstanding could be broken, if not how it came about. The morning started with heavy rain, and he was already feeling sad at the start of the day, even before going to work. He had a dream he could not remember but he felt good as he was waking up. As soon as he opened the window and looked outside, that low, depressed mood started to occupy his mind. He could not help it! Was it the legacy of having been born in the South, where the sun always shines, and the sky is always blue? Yes, of course, it might sound too idealized, but it rang true. Years of living in the North had not taken away that feeling every time the rain came, even if
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