The journals hung loosely in her apathetic gaze, devoid of the meaning and emotion they once held. Five years had come and gone, and those smallish white pages and black scribbles and childish drawings were all that had gotten her through the tough bits. All that had given her hope for the future.
Now they were but a memory, invisible to her heart as the light began to fade.
She clasped and unclasped the pencil in her hand, willing herself to write, restraining herself from the release. What good would it be, to record these thoughts and ideas if they would have no meaning, no purpose, in the times to come?
Better yet, what thoughts and ideas were there to record? The character was dead to her, the meaning lost on the rocky shores of betrayal. There was nothing here for her, nowhere to turn. She was lost at sea on the most defying of gentle waves, heeding her numbness and pulling her forward. She was stuck in a rut, a dead end that she had visited many years over, many times through her life. She was lost on what to do next.
The pencil fell through her hand, through the table, the empty pages of the journal before her, through the floor and disappeared into her mind's eye. She watched as she fell, farther into the chronicled measurements of her life, the precise descriptions that outlined her presence. Five-foot-three, size two, her life in numbers, like a child's painting. Her life in letters, like a book. Full of characters, both a tool of the trade and the destruction thereof. The destruction of her.
Her outstretched arm caught the pencil from its path, sending it deviating from its suicide course. It spun, skittering across the blank page, now marred by the black line that so accurately depicted the devious character in question. The crude drawing portrayed her very understanding of the situation - black and white, ruined by his presence. Either his presence is to be erased, or her memory of the boy shall cause her life, the spent page, to be forgotten, looked back on in shame. The decision was hers, but it lay on his shoulders, his actions, his words. The words of a character. A faulty place for one's trust.
The graphite swelled and surged and grew beneath the spread of her fingers, consuming the milky white of what had been her life, the blank page, the unused, un-tampered reduction of a world's sturdiest living being. Descendant of strength, yet easily broken; the page as itself, alone, tore from its binding. Ruined, but free.
Who knew such a figment of one's imagination could wreak such havoc? Who knew such a person as he was could change so many lives? Who knew that metamorphosis culminated in the darkest and dreariest and most frightening of times? Even the diamonds shine only under immense pressure.
But she, herself, was no such diamond.
No comments:
Post a Comment