Under the shadow of a lemon tree.

She's sitting on the highest floor of a building, and she feels like she's capable of anything. For a moment, she truly believes in it. I'm unstoppable, she thinks to herself, but no one can hear her. Once there was a man who came from a thousand miles away to see her, and before he left, he told her that she knew nothing about love, or the crooked soul that refused to be ironed out, or the world that she has created for herself. Her home, she thinks, I have one, it's sweet and smells like my mother's winter clothes. The last summer, her mother has built a little garden in the balcony, where she has planted flowers in little orange and white pots. Those flowers have no names, but to her mother, they are the most beautiful things in the house.

She knows where she is, right now. On the highest floor of a building, on a table in the corner of the floor, next to a window. There's a grey ground, a few cars are parking down there, sleeping next to each other, under the green-blue sky. She feels good, she feels nice, or maybe she doesn't feel anything at all. Maybe that's okay. To not feel the world for awhile. So she can be something she doesn't know she wants to be, something that the world has never seen before, something so powerful she can't let it exist on its own. 

People will hurt you, she whispers, like they did to me and they still do. You will get hurt, your wounds may never heal. She begs her to stay, the girl that she adores so much she calls her 'my baby girl'. Her baby girl doesn't wear mask, her face melts down in the burning sun of November, her colorless eyes are sparkling like a newborn tiny bird. She wants to protect her, but sometimes, usually at nights, she wakes up and couldn't stop crying. Tear is not what's leaking out of the corner of her eyes; it's something else. She can hear her screaming, a whiny and long and painful and heartbreaking crack coming out of her rib cage, asking to be free, to be at once with the dry mouth that produces no sound, the bleeding nose that can't take in any more breath. Her lung stops working, she thinks, her stomach is corroded from the inside, and no one but her baby girl can save her, no one but the girl without a mask can cover her in an embrace that's so tight, as if she's held in a vicelike grip of a drowning astronaut.