14 Degrees Fahrenheit, Two Weeks Past Twenty One

photo by navya shukla

14 Degrees Fahrenheit, Two Weeks Past Twenty One

third -year zoey stephens 

Two women sat in a car driving down a barren road past midnight on the second coldest night of the year. One was young but no longer a child, just skirting her way into a grown woman’s world. The other behind the wheel was older but not yet old. She was not the younger girl’s mother, but she had held her bottle and wrapped her swaddle all the same. The younger woman was not too old, but old enough to let her lips speak freely, unfettered from the adolescent predisposition towards leaving secrets unsaid. 

 There’s some beauty in womanhood, do you see it in me? 

The older woman reached across the console and grabbed her smaller hand, still clad in leather gloves to shield the elements. Fog condensed on the windshield, fighting to frost over with the rest of the night but held back by the heat of machinery and man. Their cold hands clasped tightly, sharing in what little warmth was left, and suddenly secrets were as lifeless as the windswept winter trees stretched out before them. 

There’s far more important things to womanhood than the beauty it brings. 

The young woman looked over at the other as she talked on and on, and saw pain and passion in her sleep lidded eyes. There’s some beauty in seeing an older woman cry, and in seeing her smile and laugh. That beauty doesn’t have to be physical, it’s more spiritual and mystical than that. 

Do you ever wish there was more you could be?

The car pulled into the gravel drive and idled for a moment as the conversation paused. The young woman pulled the other into a hug and rested her head on her shoulder for just a moment, a moment of remembrance in echoed childhood reflections.  She let go of her grownness for a short few seconds. When she pulled away she once again felt her age, but she lived her life in past glimpses in the warmth of the embrace. She climbed out of the passenger seat and stood in the cold, leaving the older woman in the space they had shared. 

Womanhood holds everything I wanted for me.

The car door slammed shut in the silence of the night, and the older woman drove back down the gravel drive. The conversation had ended, but the words lingered on in that moment in the car on the second coldest night of the year.