(She puts on a mild smirk as she rushes to her father’s room and tucks him into bed. His health has drastically deteriorated in the past few months- doctors have lost hope…)
She has spent her life in this house, vagabonding in the wheat fields, befriending birds and bees – she never thought she’d leave. So many nights, she sneaked out and hid behind the olive tree – in an attempt to immerse in her writings, or her dreams. It was underneath those sacred branches that she found herself… This is her sacred tree, the bearer of her secrets, the refuge of her journal and her heart…. The witness of her transformation from child to adolescent to woman … in love and out of love…
Oh, how many times had she and her father put on their identical hay hats on and given in to their fantasies in those fields. She was Coco Chanel, a French rebellion with a fascination for hats, men clothing and men themselves, while he was Jean Val Jean, Hugo’s unfortunate undercover hero who struggled with law wrongness and social injustice until the day he died – but he died pure at heart… just like her father will not more than a week from tonight… or so claim the doctors…
She will not leave this house… her father will be buried here, by the sacred tree that he loves, by the fields he has long cherished, by the birds and the bees he looked after all of his life… this is where he belongs, and this is where he shall be put to eternal rest… when the time comes… oh how she wishes time would just stop at this very moment…
