Pagan: Anna: Moving On
Written for livejournal user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt. Again, I’m not sure if this is what she was after, but I hope it works. I like it.
It seemed strange to think that it had been nearly a year since the accident. Anna looked around Charlotte’s room, still unable to think of it as anything else, and knew without any doubt that she had made the right choice. No matter what she did she would never be the daughter that Charlotte’s parents wanted, not until she became the girl they had lost in the accident, but it seemed more unlikely with each day that passed, even though some small things had returned. She just couldn’t work out if she was seeing those things through Charlotte’s eyes or though her own.
Everything that had been Charlotte’s was there. Anna couldn’t take anything that didn’t feel like it was hers and nothing had really become hers. It was as though the room was waiting for Charlotte to return in the same way that Charlotte’s parents were. It had accepted Anna as a guest, but that was all she would ever get, and she needed something that was hers. The things she had bought for herself, for the girl named Anna, were in her college bag ready for the changes she was making to her life so she could finally stop trying to be someone she wasn’t.
Lloyd was the reason Anna had made the choice to move out. She smiled thinking about the man she could call her brother, the only person in the house who had put the effort in to making her feel like a real person, rather than a someone who shouldn’t exist. As the days had passed it had got harder to have Charlotte’s parents view her as an interloper, someone who had been constructed from a day of pain and confusion who should had left once the pain had faded. They just couldn’t understand that they were part of the problem. Every time they looked at Anna and saw the wrong person in their daughter’s body she had felt the pain of that day all over again.
Anna wished she could bring the memories back, or bring Charlotte back if that was what the problem really was, but it wasn’t that easy. Nothing was easy. She ran a hand through her hair and picked up her bag, because thinking about it again, the same way she had every day, wasn’t going to help. It never helped. Looking through hundreds of pictures, listening to Charlotte’s parents reminisce, dealing with everyone who had known Charlotte and couldn’t see her as Anna - it had been draining all her strength when what she needed it for was to work out who she was.
“Ready?” Lloyd asked, as Anna turned her back on Charlotte’s room.
Nodding, Anna smiled. “As I’ll ever be.”
The suitcase following him contained more than Anna had ever owned and it made her smile. Lloyd had never blamed her for what had happened, or looked at her as though she shouldn’t exist, even though he was feeling the same pain that Charlotte’s parent’s were. Maybe one day she would magically be Charlotte again; maybe the day would come when Anna was accepted the same way that Charlotte had been; but she couldn’t keep waiting for it to happen. Lloyd had given her a route to be herself for the first time and she was determined to take it.
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.