Room 210; Thursday Afternoon [09/17].

Astrid came out of her class that day and discovered a letter from her mother; Ingrid had finally written a response to Astrid's last correspondance, the cut-up photo from the history book and just four simple enigmatic and questioning words. She didn't open it right away. She was almost afraid to, as if she wasn't ready for the answer to the question she had asked, even if she didn't imagine it would ever be explained to her, even if she knew Ingrid would never tell her. So she went for a walk around the island to bolster herself, and then she wound up back in her room, with a bag of beignets and a single black to-go coffee, which would probably go untouched on her nightstand as she sat cross-legged on her bed and finally opened the letter.

( Dear Astrid, )

Astrid lowered the letter into her lap, and blinked across the room at the window. She turned her head toward the fanciful Romanesque landscape of her current mural. Took a breath in, released it, then climbed off to the bed to pull out a box of letters from underneath it, found a container that she figured would be large enough, dug her lighter out from the hodgepodge of miscellany in the bedside table drawer.

Then she settled on the floor and slowly started to burn each and every one of the letters, collecting the ashes in the container, where, once she was finished with the last one, she would mix those ashes with copious amounts of glitter and blue-black paint, and spread them all over the wall like the vastness of space.

[[ door and post are open! Ingrid's letter taken from and slightly modified from Chapter 27 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch ]]