Trailer Hitch

She's spent the better half of her freedom wandering deserted parking lots just after twilight, entranced by the way her shadow flits across the cracked cement, the outline of a figure just barely old enough to know what she wants in life. 

A trailer's been parked out there for the better part of fifteen years, rusting its slow way towards oblivion, an ever-present aspect of the landscape for those who don't seek refuge within it. She perches on its side, scribbling another note into a journal already filled with them. Beside it, grasses tower, and she weaves each stalk between her fingers, crushing their fragile tips. She picks them at their roots, braiding them together to crown herself Queen of the Grasses, an envied title among the litany of imaginary friends she brings with her.

Here, she's capturing moments, raising her fist to the sky, swapping out the middle finger for "I love you," seeking peace signs over military gestures, branding herself an old soul of the new age. She's a girl obsessing over the literature giants of the past, hoping to be one for the future. She plays with fountain pens and ink, letting droplets pool across the page, if only for the nib to dance beneath it, as she does under the opulent obsolescence of the sinking sun. 

She longs for poetry, and her heart heeds her cry, spinning together phrases that make no sense alone but shine in nonsensical sentences. It's not the moment she's seeking here but the feeling it conveys. 

She climbs to her feet, entranced by the last remnant of light on the horizon. In an attempt to stretch out and reach it, she balances herself on the side of the trailer and climbs. Making it to to top of the rust-bucket, where the trailer hitch juts into the sky, she clutches her journal in one and hand and salutes the evening light with the other, thanking it for making the blossoming night such a poetic one. The rising moon smiles back at her, its recognition of a fellow wanderer.

Shoving the journal back into her bag, she leaps from the top of the hitch, tumbling into weeds that threaten to engulf her. Yet, as if recognizing in her a young, growing thing not asimilar to themselves, they release her back to the cultured wild of the domesticated lot and the city streets.

She runs its length and sprints away, freedom spent for youth's reward.