[memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing one thing and viewing another. Warning, this memory contains: Sunshine.
The feeling is warmth. The drowsy, comfortable kind, like lying in grass under strong sunshine. Something that used to be tight, massed under your breast-bone is soft and slack and easy. The sensation carries you through.
The room is washed-out with strong sunlight, through wide, wide windows that overlook the kind of garden someone is paid a fortune to maintain. The man in the room - because there is a man, sat in front of a desk someone has doubtless picked because the woods are soft blond and elegant, despite the complicated tangle of wires, monitors and modems scattered haphazardly across the surface - is not looking out of the window. He’s sitting in a chair, a wooden one that has castor wheels, and his back is bent over the contents of the desk.
The door crashes. She’s small, wisps of cornsilk hair and a hastily-done up coat over pale, ballet-pink clothes beneath. “Daddy,” she says, with the confidence of a child that knows she’s somebody’s world, and the man turns, his outline haloed in the backwash of light until he is gold and white and an immediate smile, with his arms extended. They collide, her laughter over his.
The light is stronger, so bright you blink against it, eyes watering.
“Dad.” She’s probably somewhere between five or six. She’s wearing a plaid skirt, her socks have strayed from her knees down to her ankles, and she invades the room without preamble. The man is back in the chair. You notice, although the girl probably doesn’t, that he looks tired. Older, perhaps more on edge. “Dad,” she says, and he glances from the desk to the girl, “I’m negotiating,” she says, matter-of-fact, the way in which children emulate what they hear, “I don’t want to move.”
He reaches for her. The light is heat and warmth, soaking through the pale fabric of his dress-shirt. He tugs her with the ease of habit onto his knee, and she folds into him, the mussed part of her hair beneath his chin. They sit, sun-soaked. “I know, peanut. But it’ll be okay.” You can hear, a little, the indulgence in his voice. A little of the worry. Adults hide anything that isn’t faith, that isn’t trust from the little people that trust them blithely. It’s hidden, from the girl. “It might even be better. New isn’t always bad.” Her cheek is pressed against the second upper-most button of his shirt. Hope. It’s a strand within the warmth, the kind of inner glint that you catch by breathing in.
The light is brighter now. Your breath catches, silvered and when you blink, the room is distinct. It’s an office. A corner-office, but an office. There’s something industrial, bland about the construction of walls, the combination of beige paint and office furniture that makes this different from the blond wood desk of before. You’re expecting her, now. The man is there, behind the desk, his head in one hand, and you, with your stranger’s eyes, can see the tiredness in full bloom. He has tension, in his jaw, in his shoulders. But you’re expecting her.
She’s not wearing plaid. She’s in jeans with scuffed sneakers and the careless, crashing haste of youth. She tosses a bag in the direction of a bland, nondescript looking chair that crashes downwards, she throws herself in the direction of his chair. Her arms go around his neck and her face is pressed against his and you can see he is startled, perhaps distracted as he blinks against the sunlight to look at her.
“Don’t leave me with her,” she says, with the petulance of young girls who dislike their mothers, “She wants to put me in a dress.” He laughs, and you can see the grip of whatever was holding him, loosen a little in the face of the calamity crashing through the door. She’s young enough, enough that when he pulls her into his side, and holds her there, her chin comes down on his shoulder. “What are you working on? Can I stay?”
There’s sunlight in your eyes. You watch, watering, as he begins a conversation that becomes less and less distinct, less and less clear, there’s a droning, dull sound like ringing steel. You can see her temper rising, you can see the man’s attempt to mollify, but the sunlight is bright, bright enough that it’s pure white light now, and the warm, drowsy sensation swallows you whole.