When I think of my time in the girl’s home, the thing I remember most is the calendar.
One had been given to me (to all the girls) by some organization, Lions club or something of sorts, whose duty it was to bestow charity upon unfortunates.
I remember that I couldn’t wait to mark off another day on that thing. Some days I would even mark twice, as if that might make the day past faster. I also marked a day in advance more than once, thinking it was late enough the evening before to be justifiable. But I soon found that that left me with nothing to look forward to the next day, so I quit.
Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, time ticked by so, so slowly, with me locked in that room. I stared at the walls and the calendar, the lone wall hanging, stared back at me. I thought my time there would never end. I prayed that if I looked at the calendar long enough, or at a different angle, days would somehow seem shorter and I experimented with tricks of light, and optical illusions marking patterns in the lines of the grid. I even went to some effort to decorate it, doodling all over the pages.
Yet as the days became shorter, so did my patience. My longing to be free of that place and the smell of sorrow, became stronger as each day passed. It was just me and the calendar fighting a battle of wills that I was destined to lose. It was the last thing I saw before I fell asleep at night and the first thing I saw as I awoke every morning.
That calendar was like some ancient torture device that tormented my soul.