2004-11-05
A Tragic, Too-Oft Told Story
hearing: Based on A True Story - Aaron Sprinkle
reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
feeling: creative and lazy
I had a ridiculous amount of trouble sleeping last night. I just don't understand the little bouts of insomnia again lately. I don't like them. But since I couldn't sleep, I constructed a little story.
I was well conditioned to write something sad. But why is better not to say. Part at least, is due to my mother being in such an ill mood. She was feeling absolutely awful, and it hung over the entire house. A mood can be so infectious, and her bad one quickly spread through the house like the plague, worsening things for everyone because we were all butting heads against each other. Chaos reigned, as children screamed and fought, cats mewled and crashed things, the dog barked, my sister yelled, my brother growled, my mother screamed at all of them.
I cradled my forehead in my hand as I poked about dinner in the kitchen and wearily flipped the pages of my american government textbook. It was a rough and tumble night. I can only imagine the venom my mother was inwardly spewing at my father for being away from home so often. She is growing so bitter towards him and she assumes that we all, myself especially, share her emotions.
I'm glad to say that I do not. But that's a depressing topic to linger on.
The evening got considerably better after I read, and enjoyed my customary reading snack, a mug of milk, a slice of bread and butter, and an ample serving of cheese. There's something immensely comforting and homely about the solid, simple snack. Meals to some in the books I read. I feel a closer connection to my childhood and to complete contentment when I partake of this sustenance.
But that's beside the point. My good feelings gave way to a sleeplessness which awoke whatever it did in my head, and caused me to produce the following story.
Opinions always welcome, hardly mandatory.
Everything was falling into place like a perfectly clich�d romance novel.
She flicked on her stereo, to a mix cd comprised of her saddest heartbreak songs. Tonight would be a night for memories.
She ticked off the months on her fingers since the sleepless night the last letter had come. The fateful blow which had scattered her heart on the winds of change. The night her better half was torn from her.
There was an emptiness inside she never knew was there before. She could trace the dotted lines inside where he used to belong. He completed her, but she hadn't known that then, and he had never alluded to feeling the same way. Sometimes she wondered if that's how he felt too, but it had been such a long time since she had seen him, that she supposed he had cast their memories aside. He must be over her by now, or he might have been on her doorstep with a big bouquet of pink daisies again.
Those strange pink daisies always made her feel better. He sought them out especially for her. She had dried a few in the pages of her favorite romance novels. She trembled over to the bookshelf and scanned her fingers across the books, extracting just the one she wanted. It had been a perfect parallel to her relationship with him. That's why she always pressed her daises in it. It reminded her of him doubly.
Opening that book slowly and overturning pages to get to the daises burned her fingers immensely. She winced at the pain as the words she borrowed on rare occasions to speak to him leapt off the pages to hiss in her ear. She stopped turning pages a moment, relishing the climax of the romance. Her tears stained the page as she remembered how her brief moments of passion with him had mirrored the violence conveyed here. He used to kiss her tenderly just like that. His fingers would trail across her hair glazed with tears for she made him that painfully joyous. They used to cry so often together. Tears and touches and kisses...closer to him than she had ever been to anyone else...
The daisies, the daises. She was after those pink daisies. That's right. She quickly turned over several pages, dragging her sleeves across her eyes and dripping nose. She got to the daisy and froze. She could remember looking up at his face over the bouquet. He'd stare down at her, his poignantly beautiful green eyes glazed over with a wonderful tenderness and concern. His emeralds were searching her very soul, to find any problems and fix them. Or would the daisies? She'd gently take her flowers from his hand and brush a kiss across his cheek. The smile which lit his face after her tiny kisses was a reward she never felt she deserved. When they first came together, she would blush pink as these daisies when he gave her that smile. That's why he bought her pink daisies...that's right. She seems to try and forget that. The pink daisies reminded him of her, and her sincerity and gentle frankness. They were like the blossom in her cheeks.
She shut the book then and laid her head across it. Ready to start crying. A cat came mewling then and shoved against her elbow. She laughed slightly, tossed the book at her bookshelf carelessly and caressed the kitten to appease it.
She walked the small length of her room and lounged on her bed. The kitten jumped from her arms at the sound of another mewl and scurried to join its brothers and sisters. She reluctantly watched it flee from her arms. The kittens were the only source of balm for her aching arms, her aching heart. She sighed wearily and pulled out her journal to scribble a line or two of beggarly poetry. A great wad of papers stuffed in the front, fell out with her roughness in extracting the journal. She quickly gathered up the papers to shove them back in her notebook when her eyes caught a row of snapshots. Photographs of him. Her favorite. All the papers in her fingers slipped away as she plucked up the photographs. Her tangible memories of him. She stared down at his passionate, concentrated face and traced the soft face she used to cosset with her fingers. Her fingers remembered the pulsing tingle when they traversed his smooth skin. She remembered every gleam in his eye as his fingers traced her. Closer to anyone than she had ever been...
She thrust the photographs aside, and with them many memories. She bent over to pick up her papers again when she noticed what she really held. His letters. Letters to her from him. She fell to perusing them. His firm, gentle declarations of the strongest love either had known. The searching, adoring words, looking to soothe and appease the strength of his feelings and her own beating heart. The poems he wrote for her, long memorized, clumsily singing the praises of her fine, maidenly form; rejoicing in the passion of loving and being loved in return as few couples had known, not even Juliet and her dear Romeo. He would repeat these in his warm, deep voice, sending magnificent thrills down her spine, lifting her out of the mire of the world into heights she had never known. Soaring with him in his arms. Crying. Words failing... silence...
Until the song broke her silent soliloquy. Her eyes flew open and immediately alight on his photos. She had only thrust them aside, not out of sight. Her heart broken hysteria rose as she moved her eyes. The letters still before her. The book has fallen open to reveal words and daisies again. The song she has apportioned to him blares through the speakers.
She screams out in pain, as her heart is torn into a million pieces again. He does not love her any more. These are memories past. He cares not a shadow for her as he used to. He feels nothing he once felt. He does not love her. The gravity of pain breaks her back and gashes her frame. A convulsive fit takes her as she cries and screams in agony to her God. She tears at her hair, tear it all out, nothing left to remind her of him... Burn...Burning inside... Her flame, her fire is devouring her. Her heart throbs in her chest and her breathing grows short. She gasps between sobs. Her crying suffocates her...
Suffocates her...
She cries aloud a line from a favorite book to the ceiling, to the song, to his photographs, to anyone or thing that could hear her,
"I must, then repeat continually that we are forever sundered: and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him!!!"
She throws it at the sky. She challenges the universe with that passionate breath.
But then she shrinks down just a little and whispers to herself, keeping the secret from the walls, "But if I cannot breathe or think, I cannot love him."
She shrinks farther, she sinks under her sheets. She presses her face deeply into the coverings. The fabric blocks out the air. Her breath cannot settle. There is nothing to draw. Her lungs gasp quietly. Her eyes close slowly. Her frame quits trembling.
He can no longer love her.
And she will love him no more.
She has perfectly executed the cycle of the clich�d romance novel.