flashback to sweet 16

I was walking Matisse around the neighborhood this afternoon. The air was cool and moist from the drizzle. The hills surrounding the valley were a lush shade of green, and the cherry blossoms and magnolias were beginning to bloom. As I walked past the children's playground at the neighborhood park, I was reminded of what had happened four years ago. It was there by the siren-colored jungle gym that I remembered the naive sixteen-year-old who had yet to realize that the beautiful boys wanted only the pretty girls, who had dreamt up the story as an escape that would consume the next four years of her life, who had discovered Nana O and began her gradual, subconscious transformation into the Ice Queen that people feared when they first met, who in spite of all this had thought she would at least experience a taste of the fairytale before she turned 20.

One month left.