An Excerpt From a Short Story

The Girl who Lives in the Wind
- Benjamin Jing

“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”—Cecilia Ahern.

[Goodbye]. I watched as half of my heart walked away into the night, the end of my grey scarf curling gracefully behind her. She never looked back. Not once. And here I am now. Still dreaming of her. She would dance amidst a phantom wind, a silver balloon glowing in the pale moonlight. The winds would rise, and I would chase that balloon, always touching its string but never quite grasping it. The balloon drifted further. And further. And further.

 “We always believe our first love is our last, and our last love our first.” – George W. Melville.

There was this spot we used to go to, underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We would hold each other tightly underneath that painted sky, watching as brides and grooms posed for wedding photos amidst the backdrop of the Opera House. I remember our first kiss. It was on a bench beneath a towering fig tree. The speckled sunlight would penetrate that leafy canopy, splattering our faces with soft blooms of colour. Now I sit on a grassy hill, only a few metres from that bench. Sometimes I still feel the ghost of her hands, warming my own wind-battered palms.

I hated her for cheating.

I loved her for loving me.

And now she’s gone.

This was a creative piece in which I focused on using figurative language to its fullest extent in order to convey emotions of loneliness and longing. The convergence of the past and present within the same setting allowed me to highlight the progression of the character's internal self, which generates interest in how the character might move on. I tinted the memory with an artistic filter ("splattering our faces with soft blooms of colour", which differs from the harsher reality of the present ("wind-battered palms").