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It’s two weeks into spring, Florida-style, and the weather is playing awfully nicely. Bella has acutely missed the sunshine, she’s realised that now that she has it back again, and she positively adores the feel of it on her face as she walks along the street, a shopping bag swinging in her right hand. She comes to a halt at the corner and looks towards her mother’s house (funny, after all these years, that her mother’s house is no longer synonymous with her own), shielding her eyes from the sun with a flattened hand, so as to see better, and then smiles abruptly as she makes out the dark shape of a young man seated on the front steps.
He beckons her forwards but she just waves slightly. He can wait. He will wait.
Leaning, Bella pulls off her sandals and then clutches them, in her left hand, by the straps. She stands there for a moment, watching the boy watching her, and then looks at her feet, observing the strange, almost ugly state that winter has reduced them to. She stretches them, curling and unfurling her toes, before taking a few cautious steps forwards, trying out the feel of the pavement beneath her. It’s odd, because when she’s in shoes she always thinks of cement as being smooth, but against the softness of her soles she can feel a thousand tiny grains making lines and minuscule sand bumps, swirling out crazily in all directions.
With a smile, she takes better grip of the groceries again, and walks slowly towards her mother’s, and the boy on the steps, her eyes casting ahead at the ground before her, checking for the tell-tale gleam of glass shards and similarly offending objects (really, the modern world does make it difficult to enjoy spontaneity sometimes). Bella is walking, heel before toe, toe before heel, like a girl on an invisible tight-rope, for no other reason than that it’s sunny and warm and she finds it amusing, when it suddenly hits her that it’s for this – the scent of plants in sticky flower, the underlying taste of dust at the top of her mouth already heralding summer, the gentle caress of sunlight on her face, and the strange sensation, rough-soft-hard-warm, of the pavement beneath her feet, which are already growing raw and tender at the unusual pressure—
It’s for this, more than anything else, that she gave up the dream of an eternal future.
The boy waiting at her mother’s front door – lazy smile on his face as he watches her pick her way across the gravel, flung into the gutter by passing cars on the bitumen – the boy is a splendid, splendid bonus. But even as she lets herself melt into his welcoming kiss, she knows that she didn’t do it for him. She did it for herself and what she’s won most is her own soul and the universe of life around her.
Bella Swan has finally learnt how to be free.