A single tear drop rolled down her face, it was followed by another and then another until she was crying. She could feel the tears but made no move to stop them. Instead, she let them roll down her neck and stain her shirt. She could hear the faint sounds of people laughing and talking loudly behind her, it was like her head was underwater. She was no longer paying attention to anything but the paper in her hands. It had only just arrived through the mail. In the back of her mind she wondered how one piece of paper had completely changed her life. Her stomach was doing flips and her heart was in her throat, her brain however was still processing. She remembered reading somewhere about how fast the synapses in the brains were and how quickly they processed information yet her brain was working very slowly.
“Dear Miss Thomas, ….”
She just couldn't process the words that came after this. It could not be true, it just couldn't. To be fair there was always a chance but for it to actually happen.She needed to sit down. She needed to sit down . Somewhere from behind her the sound of someone screaming was coming from the Television. It was soon followed by the screams of the people watching the movie. It was some kind of horror movie though she could not remember the name. It was supposed to be very scary yet nothing was scarier than the paper in her hand. How can one sentence change a person's life so much?
'Dear Miss Thomas….'
She reread the sentence over and over again trying to find some flaw, some slip up something that would prove that this was a joke. If this was a joke it was a very cruel one. Only a person with no feelings could write something like this as a joke. Someone who didn’t care about her feelings or even the feelings of her family. She read the letter four more times in trying to find some flaw, but there wasn't any flaw to be found. It was true. It was not a joke. It was true , this was really happening.
She looked over to where her family was sitting. They were hugging each other out of fear from the movie. In a few minutes they would be hugging each other for another reason, some of them might even cry. Her mother looked up with a confused look on her face when she saw the tears on her daughter's face. She stood up and walked closer to her asking her what had happened. By now everyone was watching them,the movie forgotten. Wordlessly the girl handed the letter to her mother. The woman read it once and then she read it again and again, not able to believe it much like her daughter. At last she looked up at the girl and with tears glistening in her eyes she asked her daughter if this was true. The girl could only nod, her mother burst into tears with one hand covering her mother, the letter fell to the floor.
The other people in the room instantly rushed towards them asking what had happened. The girl reached down and picked up the letter, handing it to one of her siblings. Her sister read the contents of the letter aloud, somehow this made it seem even more real. No sooner had her sister finished reading out the contents of the letter than the rest of her family was hugging her. It hit her all of a sudden, it was true. The letter was true. As the rest of her family cried and reread the letter the girl smiled, it was true, it was really true. This was the happiest day of her life.
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