It was spring and it was sad. The sky a peculiar shade of violet,
dark at the fringes and a soft pastel through the grayish clouds, like a
child’s bell like laughter; happy at first then a scattered silence. The
effervescent nip of winter still present in the wind, like a reluctant guest.
It was haunting and beautiful. The wind, the sky and the stupidly pretty
wildflowers that grew out from every crevice of the uncharacteristically
desolate park.
And she swayed back and forth on the swing, the unpleasant
creaking of the old screws the only evidence of motion. Her hair a mess from
the jolting wind, her eyes closed in meditation, drowning in her own sea of
thoughts. The song changed from a soft melody for the worst – a befittingly
strange sorrowful lullaby. She kept her lids closed, she couldn’t open them
even if she wanted to, she was trying to prolong an inevitability and callously
losing. She’d have to face the now
sometime. People like her rarely flinched from the majesty of the world, the
ineptitude to swallow the beauty and tragedy whole, to make sense, to make grave
mistakes and live on. Today she understood the shock of the fall.
She felt like a piece of fiction ready to float into a
chaotic abyss; barely there, barely breathing, barely making sense of herself.
Tears of disbelief and betrayal rolled down into silent prayers when they
reached her mouth. Now it’s getting dark, another sense of an ending
approaching her uninvited. Rejection is not a scandal of slippery handling.
Rejection barks truth in unpleasant ways, it’s true that words can be knives.
The man sitting under the Rowan tree has witnessed a silent
explosion, His hands working a manic frenzy on his typewriter. Who knows how
long our immodest guest maintained his silence. The keys betrayed him. Betrayal
has become a hot commodity, has it not? He shifts the cigarette, rolling his
tongue and steadies his gaze on the heartbreak on the swing. Then almost
imperceptibly plucks a daisy from the ground.
She holds the chains of the swing and feels the cold
hardness of the inanimate. It’s so easy to be immobile; a vapid existence is so
tempting. Life sometimes is a silent lament, a hollow sob of sorts. But there is a rationale behind the eyes meant
to see, bereaving herself from the hurtful truth would not atone the past. She
flutters her eyes open in time to find a short note in her lap.
Daisy,
That’s the problem
about being the strong one,
Nobody offers you a
hand.
The printed letters are fresh as is her volition to survive.
P.S. I wrote this after listening to a train wreck of Blues. It's good to let sadness seep into words. Also, the daisy is a metaphor for despair. I'd really like to add this setting to one of my long stories.
