Her childhood home is an ordinary brick-and-mortar house, one of the many box of matches scattered in the outskirts of the town. The white walls have turned dirty-grey and the corners weathered in time. The smallest house in town, but the most famous one, for the few lime trees that grow in front of it.
The street has waited for tarmac almost a decade and the potholes have claimed their place after the snow this same year.
She used to sneak out in the garden chasing butterflies instead of doing her homework, and gazing at the stars well past her bed time.
She has grown and left the house. Home is where your heart is, they say. She has followed her heart to find a home and been looking for the right place ever since.
She has lived in a megapolis with the widest of boulevards and the most blazing and flickering on neon lights. A place of wealth and indulgence, of an endless feast, and yet the loneliest and heartless of all corners of the world she has ever been.
She has lived in a sleepy village with the peace and quiet. It turns that even the neighbours’ wall have ears. Silence becomes her hostile guardian and entombs her in an open prison.
She has lived in a wooden cabin on the finest of golden beaches with sunbathed palms but the sun scorched her. Like a mermaid, she wishes to hide under the turquoise waves but the expanse would drowned her.
She has lived on the highest of snow cupped peaks where neither a snow leopard can climb nor a vulture can fly over. The best place to gaze at the stars it is, and leave behind dark planet. But the beauty blinds her and the frost bites her flesh.
She wanders between this country and that. Like a bird on the wing, she soar in the sky across borders to bridge the separate parts of her life.
Now, she has grown old. She goes back to the small house with the lime trees. One life she needs to realise where is the best place she has ever known.
They have knocked it down to make room for a modern block of flats. She sit in the coffee shop made of glass and steel. The huge TV screen on the wall hums as an artificial heart. She has dinner and stare at the distance where her home was. Most of the lime trees are cut off. The trunks, hollow and rotten, jut up. With the car engines revving and horn honking, the evening feels ultramodern.
She leaves the coffee shop at sun set. Could she see any stars here with all the light pollution? she wonders. A car hits her. The driver runs. A crowd gathers at the scene for about an hour. The face keeps the wonder in the eyes.
As the driver turns to be a young lad, a son of somebody important, and nobody claims the body, the event is considered as an act of God.