Sapphic Twilight, Chapters 1–3 (Patreon)

This is very much first draft. Barely proofread. I am not looking for feedback beyond "I liked this" or "I really liked this part." I am fragile and insecure about my writing. Please, be excited. Be kind. Be supportive. I want to know if this is making you happy like my music did and if you need more because I'm having fun writing this and want to know if you're having fun, too.

I drove.

I drove from Oceanside by myself.

Away from the water.

Away from the deliberate nature of the trees.

Away from the coast.

I crossed Kansas to be here.

Kansas.

Flat bumfuck nowhere whole state is a road Kansas forget that I'm driving because every mile looks the same as the last and suddenly I'm in Appalachia.

And I drive across those mountains, and then I take a left.

And come up.

Through what Vermonters would call the south, and probably me, but I digress.

I drove north.

To where the wind smells green.

Like the trees on a sugar shack postcard. Or the ones in the college brochures.

Just

Just loud. Not noisy, but present in a way that seems, well, exactly what it is.

And old.

Like the mountains.

The Rockies are young, but the Green Mountains are old, humble things.

They don't need to say anything.

They just are.

And they just are.

I didn't bring a microwave because I figured I could buy one.

I took the things I carried. The things they told me to bring.

And then I took my watercolors.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I prefer oil. It's the permanence, but in permanence, things lose mobility.

I wanted something I could use without confining myself to one place.

But like I said;

Not to put too fine a point on it.

And like I would say,

I like trees.

One thing I would learn about people who grew up here is that they think about trees the same way I think about the ocean. How could you not.

And while I have your attention,

I would like to ban icebreakers and small breakout groups.

Small Breakout Groups.

“Tell us your name, your major, and why you chose Northbridge.”

It was me, maybe twenty other students, and a professor of it literally does not matter to the story. You would forget if I told you.

So,

We went around the room. Chadwick von Republican who was inexplicably at a liberal arts college in southern Vermont said that markets fascinate him.

Judy I-did-it-to-get-my-family-off-my-back said she chose pre-med because she wanted to help people.

Everyone seemed to have rehearsed in the mirror on the car ride up.

But then I remembered that I was probably the only person from outside New England here.

“Rowan. Undeclared,” I said.

That part was true.

“Why Northbridge?”

I almost said trees.

I did not say trees.

“I wanted something different,” I told them.

Which is the sentence people say when the real answer would take too long.

Or when they don't know and want people to think they're deep.

But how would you know.

And then we did the thing I said I wanted to ban.

Small breakout groups.

Chairs moved and people rotated. The room rearranged itself, and we all looked like furniture in a room that didn't know what it wanted to be yet. Which was, of course, very on the nose.

Except a girl with loose, dark hair.

She hadn’t moved.

Not when the chairs scraped.

Not when people shuffled themselves into new little conversational ecosystems.

Everyone else was performing.

You could see it in the posture. The half-lean forward. The polite nodding. The way people held their hands like they had somewhere important to put them and who fucking knows what to do with their hands, ever.

She just existed in her space. Grand in how little of it she occupied.

Which is not actually normal when twenty strangers are trying to prove they deserve to exist in the same room.

Her coat was folded over the back of the chair. Wool. Dark.

She wore it like boots.

And her hands were flat on the desk.

Still.

Not tense.

Just… not doing anything.

Someone in our group said, “Okay, same prompt.”

Name.

Major.

Why Northbridge.

The guy next to me spoke first. Something about political science. The girl across from him said environmental studies and something about sustainability.

Then the still girl spoke.

“Clara.”

Her voice was low.

Not shy. Just quiet in the way someone gets when they don’t need to compete with the room.

“Literature.”

That was it.

The other girl waited.

“Why Northbridge?” she asked.

Clara looked at the desk for a moment.

“Quiet,” she said.

And then she stopped talking.

Which, weirdly, felt like a complete answer.

No one pushed.

We all kind of nodded like that made sense, which it did, even though nobody had said that reason yet.

I realized she was looking at me.

Not in a weird way.

Just directly.

Like she had decided I was the person in the room she was going to pay attention to.

Which is unsettling when you have not volunteered for it.

I looked away.

Obviously.

Because if someone is going to look at you like that, the polite thing to do is pretend you have suddenly become very interested in the grain of a wooden desk.

But I noticed something anyway.

When the professor told us to rotate again, everyone moved.

Everyone.

Except

Clara.

She stayed exactly where she was.

Like a mountain.

Old. Quiet.

And perfectly content to let the rest of us rearrange ourselves around her.