My Grown Up Christmas List

Dust motes sparkle through the sunlight. Rather than colliding, they pair up and waltz until they settle. I can imagine them giggling, sipping champagne while they rest.

Sometimes the state of my sugar levels worries me.

From downstairs comes the snap of masking tape and the crackling of cardboard boxes. I should be contributing my muscle to the “bona fide” war effort. It is an odd choice of words, but my parents are well-meaning in their attempts to educate the general populace. Yet, we are always defeated.

There is warmth at my legs and a purr. I smile and drop my hand for her to muzzle. As always, teeth and gum scrape across my knuckles whenever she is vehement for my attention. She has been safe all these years; the small are always overlooked. My parents are giants: tall and opinionated. They wear their manifesto on their sleeves, and frequently passer-bys cringe, shrinking away.

“That's who they are... it's simply not right.”

I always hear the whispered outrages, even if my parents appear to be oblivious. Is this what being unshakeable in your beliefs really means?

“Does it really have to be so obvious?” I asked this when the eggings began again.

Fixing her fringe as if it were askew, Mum replies. “The wind doesn't have a voice yet it blows a hurricane. Apparently there's a difference.”

“So when the ocean heats up so does the wind?”

“It's a fact,” Dad pipes up, weather updates glinting off his glasses.

To emphasise my point I would look up at the sky when we used to go for walks and say “The sky's still not burning,” a smirk on my face.

They answer rationally. “That's what we're preventing.”

Some children are scared of ghosts, but their determination scares me more. With every postal address that came and went it only increased. To my dismay the weather remained as unpredictable as ever. A butterfly deep in the jungles of the Amazon can muster a hurricane with an unthoughtful flap of its wings.

Logic suggests we cull all butterflies, but rationality remembers that it would constitute genocide.

So I write to you in the twenty-third house that I am now moving out of. That is, from the incidences I remember. Do you share similarly brazen hopes and expectations for change? If you do, please, think of what the small will endure and always question its worth.