lock it up and throw away the key

From a distance you couldn’t see the disappointment etched into her face. The lines that spread, not with ease, searing into her skin, promising to become permanent if a sweet release didn’t save her. He had taken something from her. Long ago and it was that, which her mother had always warned to keep sacred, she would say, lock it up and throw away the key, and only the one who finds that key through all the rubble is the one who you can entrust it to.

He had merely plucked her from a garden of lilies. Seeing only her fine lines at first, staring her down to a shrivel.

He walked away on that sunny day, his back to her, she could still remember the ease of each stride as the sun was setting. She imagined he would look back to her sitting on the walkway. Her dress lying as pavement, so willing to be stepped all over. The white dress, stained, grass stains, dirt scattered around the hem. Her head racked with memories, not so distant. 24 hours pass, then another, and another. A laugh erases a little of the pain, so she surrounds herself with those who see little of her flaws. It isn’t enough though for she sees her fault, repeating it in her head, soon her mind is riddled with all that she could of and should of. Seeing her unwillingness in it all. As the leaves come to fall down again on her, another year passes and she is still walking that path alone.

The sun is shining down, but her heart is becoming more hollow. Not even the birds and the butterflies can make her heart sing. Obsessed now in all that she isn’t, losing all that she is.

What she doesn’t know is that there is this spark in her that she let that boy walk away with on that warm summer’s day. She only wished to share her life experience, but she had written it away and locked it up in that little diary. Throwing the key to the first that would catch it. He tried to read those pages but they were all stained, blank ink smudged from the tears that she so long ago had forgotten to wipe away.