Backdated because I am super slow. Takes place some time back in March.
Word Count: 491
Why was it that all of life's important moments came with pieces of paper?
Birth certificates, death certificates, social security cards, marriages licenses—every stage of one's life fruitlessly immortalized on paper to be crumpled, lost, torn, stolen, burned, or shredded. They were so fragile and yet they held so much meaning, validated the course of one's life, one's relationships, and one's identity.
Looking back, Paris would come to remember this period of her life by an endless stream of papers. Files, certificates, bills, letters, receipts, passed from person to person for signatures, payments, referrals, recommendations. She kept copies of all of them. Some might call her record-keeping needlessly obsessive, but Paris was unwilling to let even one of those fragile pieces of paper go missing. Her life may now be defined by their presence, but it was preferable to the alternative.
Paris sat in her dressing room with the latest of these papers held between slim fingers clutched in her lap, as she again read over the contents she'd already committed to memory earlier that afternoon. It was all very clinical, impersonal. Yet to have it there in her grasp should have felt like an achievement, and though receiving it had come with a sense of relief, the rest of her emotions struggled to surface beneath the resignation with which she'd come to face the long, arduous process of confronting the world as she was, and not as others had determined her to be.
With this she was able to continue putting certain demons from her past behind her. Not just the past, she amended—for that assessment wasn't entirely true—but her present as well. In many ways it seemed to her unfair that her life should depend upon the granting of two letters to officially state what a part of her had always known. And yet she took comfort in the copy she held. With it came some small shred of solace.
Slowly Paris stood to access the safe that contained her jewelry. She entered the combination (2-7-11, the date of her awakening) and removed from inside the safe a fireproof box. This she unlocked as well, and added the copy of the recent letter to a folder of files already kept safely within.
“Paris!” Chris called, and poked his head around the door to her dressing room. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She placed the folder back into the box, placed the box back into her safe, and reset the lock before turning to join her husband.
Chris slid his arm around her waist and leaned down to press a kiss to her mouth.
Paris smiled, returned the kiss, and leaned close as Chris led her from the room to make their way out to a celebratory dinner.
This was just one more step along the path leading her to happiness. She could feel it there, just beyond the tips of her fingers, waiting to greet her at last.
