She sat still and quiet, freezing in the shivering rain until her bones turned to stone and there she was, a monument, worldly eyes gone blank and empty on the realities around her as hollow pupils gazed upon an expanse outside the realm that rain could touch. She remained, frail but solid, faded in a grey silhouette of things to be forgotten and long-from-now remembered; but only in partial, only in fragmented memories and skewed images as the desperate and disturbed pain to remember what the reason was for her being there. And as they stand and stare at her feet, slowly beginning to cover with moss and etch with the cracks of a feigned age, they scratch their balding heads and itch their deafened ears, licking with dried tongues a distant taste still lingering on chapped lips; a faint recollection for the taste of youth. What was it, they wonder, that brought her here, that made her here, that froze her here? And as they stand in question, they, too, begin to shiver and grow cold; slowly the touch of iron and rock sweeps between their toes and nudges at their knees. Remaining still, still, so still, they wonder, what was her life, what was her purpose, what was the reason for her being there? Gray stone quivers about their heels, stirring not a lost face among them, and slowly the vines of age begin to crawl designs up their legs, brown and blue and purple too, imprinting the thunderbolts of the last summer storm they didn’t sleep through. Color fades and the world turns gray. Where they stand, mesmerized by a life frozen in time, they too are frozen by time. One moves. She had life! The Gray Lady had breathed! and danced! and laughed! There had been rainbows! An autumn wind moves in to chill the last of desolate souls, but the advocate of winter’s icy heart made an error; moving too quick to cause a sudden chill and freeze them all in the oblivion of daydreams, wind moved a leaf; swiped it off a branch and spun it dizzy, let it dance in the cold wind’s tail. And what the wind understood as trembles and shudders of fear, an inquiring soul understood for the motion to dance. The leaf faltered and from the cold wind’s back, was bucked off the beast of bitter entities. Orange and red, freckled in yellow sunshine, the leaf drifted down and cradled on a shoulder of one soul who still remembered; one being still obliged to live, to move, to question and move-on from doubt. The vines let up from the colorless undertow, releasing one rebel life. A foot lifted from the pulls of gravity, of frozen reality, and an adventurer moved on. The Gray Lady cracked the cement on her face and smiled. There was color still to live.