Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhighdorms2019-02-11 07:34 am
white_oleander) wrote in fandomhighdorms2019-02-11 07:34 am
Entry tags:
The Pool; Monday During Classes [02/11].
Not realizing yet that the one class she'd wished to avoid would actually be cancelled that day, Astrid decided she would just go ahead and skip all of her Monday rigmarole, especially if it helped make it seem a bit less like she was singling out any particular class. Part of her wondered if there was much point to skipping, especially since next week was spring break, she could suck it up for another day, but she'd said she was probably going to, and she felt she almost had to, especially if it wound up Mae would join her. Besdies, after the weekend, she felt she needed a skip day for an actual, solid reason now, too. Her head was swimming with her renewed memory, clashing against everything she'd conjectured while her whole life was nothing but a blank slate, an empty canvas that she'd rigerously tried to cover as she poured through all the letters in her desk from her mother, all of her mother's journals, all of her books of poetry, and Astrid's own sketchbooks.
It created a fascinating, brilliant, almost god-like image in her mind of this woman who was supposedly her mother, this effervescant force of nature that seemed mythical and unreal. And even though Astrid tried to search through nearly every line and in between, she couldn't find much of herself in there. There were a few things, here and there, her mother talking about how much she missed her, remincicing about them living in Paris, in Amsterdam, in Mexico; her mother mentioned how Astrid would draw, but she didn't need that clue, she'd already answered that one for herself. There were a few that seemed a little vitriolic, anger over some things she'd done or hadn't done, things she'd taken an interest in: someone named Ray, a decision to dye her hair red, something about homecoming court, pink dresses and hopeful heels. She appeared in a few of the poems, a few journal entries, but alwaya addressed like she was just another one of Ingrid's poems, a work of art, something she created to be beautiful and reflective, another mark left on the world. Though she'd spent all of yesterday, hunched over piles of books and paper loaded on her bed, she'd gone to sleep that night with not much more of an idea of who she was than she'd had when she'd woken up on Saturday.
And when she woke up today...the memories were back, she knew who she was, but that perspective stayed and she started to wonder. Who was she, really? Was Amnesiac Astrid onto something? Was she really anything more than something Ingrid had willed into being, to be a reflection of her own genius, only the problem with a person over a poem is that you couldn't quite just edit and rewrite it to be what you wanted it to be.
So Astrid skipped her classes, she went down to the pool, she swam laps until she felt too tired for more, and then found a floating tube in the supplies closet that she could just settled into and float around in, staring at the ceiling, trying to get her thoughts sorted out and trying to convince herself that she should really get going on that idea to paint the ceiling down here and wondering what color the sky in California would be just then.
[[ open pool is open! ]]
It created a fascinating, brilliant, almost god-like image in her mind of this woman who was supposedly her mother, this effervescant force of nature that seemed mythical and unreal. And even though Astrid tried to search through nearly every line and in between, she couldn't find much of herself in there. There were a few things, here and there, her mother talking about how much she missed her, remincicing about them living in Paris, in Amsterdam, in Mexico; her mother mentioned how Astrid would draw, but she didn't need that clue, she'd already answered that one for herself. There were a few that seemed a little vitriolic, anger over some things she'd done or hadn't done, things she'd taken an interest in: someone named Ray, a decision to dye her hair red, something about homecoming court, pink dresses and hopeful heels. She appeared in a few of the poems, a few journal entries, but alwaya addressed like she was just another one of Ingrid's poems, a work of art, something she created to be beautiful and reflective, another mark left on the world. Though she'd spent all of yesterday, hunched over piles of books and paper loaded on her bed, she'd gone to sleep that night with not much more of an idea of who she was than she'd had when she'd woken up on Saturday.
And when she woke up today...the memories were back, she knew who she was, but that perspective stayed and she started to wonder. Who was she, really? Was Amnesiac Astrid onto something? Was she really anything more than something Ingrid had willed into being, to be a reflection of her own genius, only the problem with a person over a poem is that you couldn't quite just edit and rewrite it to be what you wanted it to be.
So Astrid skipped her classes, she went down to the pool, she swam laps until she felt too tired for more, and then found a floating tube in the supplies closet that she could just settled into and float around in, staring at the ceiling, trying to get her thoughts sorted out and trying to convince herself that she should really get going on that idea to paint the ceiling down here and wondering what color the sky in California would be just then.
[[ open pool is open! ]]
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"Probably not too late to start building an ark," she offered.
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"See?" she said instead. "You don't need a lot of money. Just some resourcefulness."
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"Yeah . . . having money definitely helps too, though."
If the town had any money, they could potentially fix the trolley system, for instance.