Not long after, Amelia realized that it was getting late. After all, this was supposed to have been just a short stop on the way home. As much as she wanted to keep talking, she had important lectures to attend to in the morning. As she was putting on her coat in the hallway and thinking about the next day's schedule, she recalled what Lily, who was nearby absent-mindedly fiddling with the parts of the wrecked plane, had mentioned earlier. Amelia smoothed her jacket and then gazed at the wrecked plane.
“To think... after all that.” Lily turned to look at her inquiringly. “This... this is how we meet. Because of a crashed plane. Again.” Amelia gave her friend a slightly sad smile. To her surprise, Lily smiled back, albeit briefly.
“You are kind of the reason I started flying radio-controlled planes. I have never been in a real plane, but whenever I saw one it reminded me of you, and what you told me about flying with…” She hesitated. “With your parents.”
“Really? But how did that lead to radio-controlled planes specifically? It doesn’t seem that common of a pastime.”
“The work I do. Translations. It is a somewhat ironic profession for someone who always had trouble communicating. But I can do the work from home, and it turned out that a good memory is also good for learning languages,” Lily replied with a slight shrug. She was lost in thought for a moment. “Oh. Right. I ended up translating a manual for a plane model similar to this. It got me thinking about those stories of flying, and not long after I found myself buying one just to try. Turned out I quite like it. It is rather relaxing for the most part.”
“What a strange sequence of events,” Amelia mused. “But you’re working from home, huh? So, no getting up early in the morning for you to worry about, I suppose. But I on the other hand should get going as I really do have an important lecture in the morning. We have each other's numbers now, and well, I know where you live” – she said the last part with her best horror movie impression, earning a blank look from Lily – “so let's meet up again soon, okay? We'll have plenty of time to talk. And at least to me, you seem to be doing just fine to me on that front now, so I look forward to it.”
“Not as well as you might think,” Lily reiterated, sighing. “But better not get into that, or we will be at it all night.”
With a smile and an amused shake of her head, Amelia headed for home in higher spirits than she could remember being in a very long time. Unfortunately, those high spirits were soon to be dampened by a night filled with woefully familiar nightmares of crashing planes.
After her guest had left, Lily went to sit on the recliner and ended up staying there for nearly three hours, outwardly more or less just staring at the point where the wall and roof met each other. Inwardly, her mind was bouncing all over the place. After her initial minor meltdown, she had managed to hold it together, but no matter how glad she was of the reunion, it also left her exhausted with all the emotions and memories racing back and forth inside her. And despite that exhaustion, her mind still refused to calm down. Even as she realized how late it was and started to finally feel like she should go to sleep, she also felt afraid to, as if what had happened would then become just a dream. And that very fear of meeting her friend again having been nothing but a fleeting daydream or a hallucination was what had suddenly hit her so hard once she'd invited her in, as illogical as such thoughts might seem to others.
However, to her, it certainly wouldn't have been the first time dreaming about meeting her long-lost friend again and waking up to crushing disappointment. In fact, during the very first night after learning Amelia had been taken away from the children's home, she had had a vivid dream where she woke up in the morning to find her friend sleeping in the bed next to her just like almost every morning for the past two years. The caretakers didn't quite know what to do with her when she refused to leave her bed for almost the entire day, insistently trying to fall asleep to go back to her dream. Any attempt to remove her from the bed had been met less than gently.
She really hadn’t wanted her friend to leave, but she knew she’d likely just scare her off by being too insistent.
Try as she might, she couldn't help fearing she'd end up disappointing Amelia, who seemed to think she was doing so well. With such thoughts going round and round in her head, she finally fell asleep on the recliner. And as she'd worried, her dreams were not of the serene kind either.
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