at home.

She says she's sleeping, but she's not. There's this window that looks out into her backyard, and she's looking through these white-washed sills to gaze upon a white-washed world. This is all we've ever known.
It's this world where you can see visions of children playing in the splash of the sprinklers reflected in the glass of her far-off shed.
It's where the grass is trimmed just so, and the slow-coming twilight plays on the ripples of backyard, inground pools. A world of scraped elbows on chipped curbs, training wheels, first and fourteenth kisses, lost learner's permits, ribbons stretched around enormous tree trunks.
A world we could bathe in and nearly forget that we'd been growing up all this time.
But she's avoiding sleep for a reason, and this world is suddenly and wholly strange.
Perhaps because it's been the year. The year that changes you, catapulting you into that quarter-life crisis you thought up until now, was a joking cliche.
A year so full of break-ups and breakdowns, loss, and pure uncertainty, that between all the aching and wishing, waiting and missing, you finally realized what growing pains are.
She'd grown up, and really, she'd missed it all.
And so, she's left with nothing but the windowsill, to stare at the dimming yardscape, the winking peek-a-boo of the fireflies, and wait.
To know this tainted new world and wait.
Just wait.