Britannia, NY

( For it's my thoughts that bind me here/It's this love that I most fear/And this child I would destroy/For I hold her pain most dear/No haven for this heart/No shelter for this child in mazes lost/Heaven keep us apart/A curse for every mile of ocean crossed )

( I can't believe/in you I stay destined,/I can't believe/I know you're still here/once you are seen/it all becomes mystic/the lightning of love/in full form appears/on my hands/on my knees/I've buried my burden/up the stairs/unlock the door/to the suffocation keep. )

It's Molly's dad who brings her home, after all. The school didn't recommend a medical leave, but her father insisted on it--after all, he said, if she's going to be wheelchair bound it would be best to have her in a familiar environment. Actually he just worries about her, and the way she swings between being an utterly normal girl, the daughter he's lived with for eighteen years, and someone who's lonely and quiet and acts scared of him when he can't see any reason he's ever given her to be afraid of her own father.

She can still get out of the wheelchair sometimes and use crutches and leg braces, and that's what she does inside the house. But she'll have the chair for the next three months, and she tends to rely on it.

It just seems so futile. She was so happy to go to college, to get out of this place and away from everything and start fresh somewhere where she could make friends who loved the same things she does--and there was Stephen, who was a great boyfriend except that he drove drunk--and she wants it all back, but Stephen's in the hospital in a coma and she's back in Britannia in her chair. Never mind the dreams she keeps having, the ones that make her scared of her dad, the ones that aren't formed enough to tell her anything concrete except that her father doesn't love her, he isn't proud of her, he's ashamed, he's angry, and if she provokes him he'll hit her, and she should stay out of his way and hide, and she's so lonely because she can't find her brother and none of that makes sense--

None of this makes sense.

Thursday morning finds her wheeling herself through town, looking at all the new shops that have sprung up since she left. It makes her feel like she's lost in her own home, and after a while she brakes on a less well-trodden part of the sidewalk and buries her face in her hands and cries.

( Your hazel green tint eyes watching every move I make/ And that feeling of doubt, it's erased/ I'll never feel alone again with you by my side/ You're the one, and in you I confide/ And we have gone through good and bad times/ But your unconditional love was always on my mind. )