Different

Never had fall been more beautiful, a symphony of warm colors, like a nature’s embrace, and it made her feel loved by a love higher than this world.

Mary made her way sheepishly through the small park, lowering her eyes as she passed the rare visitors, because the fire in them scared people who didn’t understand it. It had scared her too at first, but not for a long time now.

Their unusual color, a muted glow of embers, echoed the ruby of burning bushes and sugar maples like their color turned with the seasons as well.

She’d been born this way, hair snowy white, her porcelain skin the palest shade of alabaster and eyes of fire.

It’s strange how physical appearance shapes one’s fate: Mary had spent her entire childhood knowing herself to be different from other humans, in ways nobody deemed to acknowledge.

She believed the secret of her arrival to this world had been kept hidden behind a wall of silence by the grown-ups in her life, who tried to convince her she was just like anybody else, a fact one furtive glance in the mirror was enough to contradict.

Her mother kept giving her scientific explanations with complicated terms like amelanism and genetic mutation, but Mary knew in her heart she wasn’t like the rest at all.

This truth came to her in dreams and she’d heard it in her heart, that hers was a special destiny, to embrace fire and tame it, like a present day Prometheus, to harness its transformative power.

She walked the earth in silence, with the bearing of a fairy, barely touching the ground, weightless like breath. In that silence she felt her connection to the wind, sun and rain whom she considered her kin more than she did humans, and she had no bitterness about it, because that didn’t make her feel odd, but rare, and powerful, and special.

The shy little girl who secretly believed herself a salamander had grown into a young fire goddess, whose ember gaze made the sugar maples glow brighter in the October light.

She found a bench and sat down in the shade of birch trees. Their bark was still peeling off in the unusually mild fall; nature wanted to give Mary a backdrop worthy of her flaxen tresses. It was still warm in the middle of October, too warm for the cozy sweater she was wearing and whose white glowed even brighter against the silver of her hair.

Those dreams she had dreamt as a child she shared with no one, they were her secret dwelling, her palace, fit for an elemental, a place where she danced free, undaunted by fear, conformity and customs, to a music only she could hear, which seemed to resonate from all around her and from herself as well, fitting her properly inside reality like a jewel in its setting.

The young woman lifted her eyes to watch the sunlight sift through the golden trees, shielding her vision with her palm and smiling to a passer-by, who, like most people, was so dazzled by their unusual color he forgot the norms of polite society and fell straight into her soul, lost and mesmerized, until his walking companion called his attention back to the real world.

The fire in her eyes mellowed and her smile grew brighter, and she realized she was happy for no reason, other than, maybe, the soft silver of the birch branches and the sunshine that covered them in copper and gold.

Brassy leaves landed at her feet and she watched without thinking as the wind carried them away. She caught a colorful one before it reached the ground and its brilliant copper, amplified by the sunshine, made her feel like she was holding fire in her palm, tamed to purr at the touch of her white fingers like a kitten.

A ray of light flashed in the mirror of a windowpane, and for a moment she saw her own reflection in it, looking back at her like through a veil.

“What are you looking at, Mary?” her grandmother used to ask her when she was little and got lost in her dreamworld, fascinated by its wonders.

All those treasures her sight had uncovered patiently in time were still there in her eyes, an open secret offered to anyone for a price: the audacity not to avert one’s gaze for fear of their fire.

She got lost in thought again, resting her sight on the turning foliage overhead, and another passer-by followed it for a few moments before he asked her what she was looking at, like an echo from her past.

Mary smiled and shook her head no, to let him know she wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and the momentum loosened a red maple leaf which had gotten trapped in her hair. She smiled and stared into his eyes, and her magic gaze shook him to the core with the uncanny feeling two roses were watching him intently from under a blanket of snow. Something more than human, but still of this world, a part of nature and its equal as well.

“What are you looking at, Mary?” her grandmother's voice echoed endlessly inside her head.

Clouds. Sunlight. Leaves carried in the wind. Dogs. Pigeons. Birches. Seasons. Life. Cars passing in the distance. Earth. Air. Colors. Nothing.

“I’m looking at nothing.”

And she smiled.

Photo by Mariya Razina on Unsplash