The sculpture had always been the highlight of her walk to the grimy elementary school she attended.

  She sprinted past heavily-trafficked streets and hostile stares from those who were supposed to be her neighbors, but always slowed down just a bit when she came across the looming structure.

It was a vivid shade of maroon, almost too bright to be in such close vicinity with the gray buildings that lined the block. Those buildings, she thought, were for adults who despised their jobs.  The structures were perfect geometric shapes, never straying from the blueprints set out for them; literal interpretations of one not daring to step outside the box.

The statue, though, however, followed no pattern. It twisted and turned, caving in on itself in one place as if the sun were melting it, just to jut out again in another place. If people were to take the time to look close enough, they would see its true shape.

They would know that it was not just four tons of clay mashed together and painted a bright maroon, but two bodies intertwined in a crushing embrace, while at the same time appearing to be pushing each other away.

  It seemed to her as though the clay people knew they were poison together, that they could never fully give themselves to the other, but still they couldn’t bear to let go. They had no faces, but the emotions of love and pain they felt were clear to see.  And so, the little girl loved it.

She felt it was the only spot of beauty in her neighborhood otherwise littered with candy bar wrappers and cigarettes long burned out.  When she drifted to sleep at night, the outline of the sculpture would press against her
eyelids, never fading.

When she woke up and lifted the straps of her backpack over her bony shoulders, she anticipated seeing the figure minutes later on her trek to school.

  The clay people spoke great volumes to her without saying anything at all.

  They were her greatest friends. Sometimes their hushed communication was enough to drown out the yelling and endless car horns that surrounded her home.  She was connected to them, and because of this she had felt out of balance for hours on that day many years ago.

When the teacher dismissed her from afternoon detention for sticking gum in a particularly rude classmate’s hair, a crime she had not even committed, she ran toward the statue quicker than usual. She didn’t even notice the heat wave rolling through the city or the perspiration trickling down her back. Her adolescent mind could only focus on one thing.

The sculpture finally came into view, and the girl felt relieved. It was where it always was, shining brightly in the sun. But it didn’t take her long to notice the crane and the wrecking ball so precariously attached to it. She remembered thinking that after one swing, the ball might just fly off its chain and slam right into an unsuspecting bird.

But when the wrecking ball was finally put to use, this did not happen. It executed its job perfectly, smashing the girl’s favorite statue to bits in mere moments. It did not happen in slow motion as the girl so
often saw events unfold in the movies. One second the clay people were there, and the next only a pile of maroon rubble remained.

The girl had stood glued to the same spot for half an hour, staring at the empty space where the sculpture had once been. Were it not for the heat squeezing all the liquid from her body, there probably would have been tears streaking her cheeks.

She only decided it was time to leave when an old woman with kind eyes and yellow teeth offered her a sip of water and informed her with a tsking tone that a young girl with such beautiful skin shouldn’t let it burn in
the scorching sun. Skin cancer could be a very nasty thing. The girl gulped water from the bottle the woman offered her, and without saying thank you, asked why the sculpture had been torn down.

The woman had shook her head at the girl. She told her that the statue was too much of a distraction, an eye sore really. Her son was a business man, a very successful one at that, and he had told her how everyone in his office hated it. It was too different.  It stood out too much, and was entirely unnecessary to the world.

  Often, the girl had felt she was viewed the same way.

Looking back on it, it is difficult for the girl, now having grown into to a woman, to recall the image of the sculpture. She tries to remember it.  Sometimes, during her breaks at work, she even doodles it on spare printer paper, but can never quite get the color right.

Once, her boss caught her attempting to recreate the image. He had wondered aloud why she would want to remember such an ugly sculpture, if one could even have called it that. He then had let her know, in a slightly condescending voice, that there was a complaint about the company’s product on line two, and it was her job to smooth things over.

  She couldn’t blame him for gloating.  He had just been promoted from the job she was hired for. And she certainly knew him well enough for a bit of teasing, seeing as he was and is her fiancé.
 
Sure, he doesn’t understand her appreciation for art or give her butterflies every time she sees him.  However, he has other things going for him.  A stable job, witty humor, and a handsome smile are really more than an average woman can ask for. She truly believes he is a good man.

But every time she is with him, something feels off.

Sometimes, she wonders what would’ve happened if she had turned out the way she had always expected as a child. If she had taken a risk, and done what she wanted instead of what her teachers told her she wanted, would it have paid off? She had always figured it was too late. Twenty-eight is far too late to start over. But is it?

She has no children, no immediate family in town. Really, the only things tying her down are a job that she has never and will never enjoy doing, and a two-month lease on a run-down apartment.  Her fiancé will be crushed, but somewhere deep inside, the woman knows he will forget her relatively fast.

The only other thing keeping her in this beat-up city are memories of the sculpture she loved so much as a child. It’s ridiculous for her to feel such an emotional tie to something that doesn’t exist anymore, but maybe this ridiculousness is the reason she can’t stay. She doesn’t want to look back on her life with regrets for what could have been.

She decides to leave. Sure, she makes this decision at three in the morning with more than one sip of wine in her system, but she feels entirely lucid. She doesn’t know what she will do or where she is going, but she figures she has enough savings to keep her afloat for at least as long as it takes for her to figure out.

The woman is responsible enough to wait until the next afternoon to leave. She decides she will not be included among those people who leave a note and run. She is better than that. Her fiancé begs her not to go, but in the end gives her up quicker than she had expected. Maybe he knows her mind is made up, and there is no going back.

Once the hardest part is over, everything else seems eerily simple in comparison. Surely up and leaving is more complicated than this.  She feels she must be forgetting something, but knows she is not. What if this isn’t the right decision? What if this isn’t really what she wants?

  Her entire cab ride to the train station, she is sure she has made a mistake. She buys the ticket.  It’s too late to change her mind now. Her stomach is in knots, too complicated for even the highest ranked Boy Scout to untie. She walks slowly towards her platform, staring at the concrete beneath her all the while.

When the train arrives and she finally glances up, she falls to the ground with relief. All doubts exit her mind in supersonic fashion, like they were never even there.

The train is painted just the right shade of maroon.