Life was a Story with Broken Words

         Her black hair was coarse and thick, but when she brushed the tangles out of her hair, it shone with the stardust of her dreams. She wove little braids and tied them with golden bands at the ends, golden as the stories she wove for others. Silver tears stained her eyes when she cried, streaming down her cheeks in little rivers of sorrow. Her stories were her soul, her pain, her sorrow, her joy, her rage, her hurt, her happiness, her life. Her voice was intoxicating, her eyes were enchanted, her smile was blazing with the passion she had for the knowledge she gained from watching others. Her feet were bare, dirt-covered sometimes, but she enjoyed feeling the life-giving soil under her feet. She wore pencils like earrings, her paint like tattoos adorning her bronzed body, her paper like little doves nestled in her hands. When her eyes sparkled, the ivory sparrows that danced around her head fainted for a moment. When she laughed, the stars twinkled brighter to guide her words to their waiting heavenly bodies. When she cried, the angels lay down and died for such a heartbreaking sound was never heard. She wove her stories, holding them gently between her nimble fingers, careful not to crush them into stardust. Her ideas sat in her palms, waiting patiently to be woven into the colorful tapestries of her imagination. She worked all the time, connecting ideas behind her dark eyes like puzzle pieces of her heart.

         Sometimes she was stared at, her eyes darkening to hide what was dancing behind them and her face wiped clean of emotion. She was careful with others, careful not to allow herself to be drawn too close. A silver moth hovering near a white golden lantern, drawn towards it and yet repelled at the same time. She wanted the light of others, but the fear of being scorched alive was too great. Forever she hovered between, caught between living and dying. She sometimes chose one over the other, but was careful either way. She allowed her stories to be her deliverance, saving her sometimes with their soothing sounds and gentle rhythm. She was afraid, she was fearless, she was everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. Her life was a story with broken words to her. Tears flowed behind her eyes and laughter sang beneath her heart. She was the storyteller, the dream-weaver, the one who could listen with an open mind until the world fell inside the darkness of the universe. She didn’t like herself that much, she thought she was not perfect as she so wished to be. She was too tall, too short, too pretty, not pretty enough, too smart, not smart enough, not thin, not right, not perfect. She wove her own desires into her stories, willing them to happen.

         Other people saw themselves inside her stories, mirroring their desires inside of her. They saw their own faces peering out at them from inside the glass music box that was her imagination. Her stories comforted them, soothed them, interlaced with their own lives. She completed them as they lived through her stories, they became her and she became them. She opened herself a little, caution decorating her mind like graffiti on a brick wall lining a dark street. She reached out carefully, fearing pain and hurt. She allowed her stories to lead the way, careful to follow them as they followed her. She received the pain and hurt she expected, and more than she could have dreaded, but she also found something she was not looking for. Maybe she had been looking for it, maybe this was the empty feeling, the bullet hole in her heart. She yearned for what she was looking for, but she didn’t know what it was. She found love though; she found adoration, she found affection, she found tenderness, she found fondness, she found passion, she found devotion. She basked in the cool warm glow of her love, she needed it somehow in the same way she needed her stories. He needed her too, in a way that she didn’t fully understand yet. He needed her stories too, she shared them with him and he loved them. Like a doorway into her mind, into her heart, she allowed him to gaze at the hidden treasure that was her soul. He was gentle, tender, careful not to crush this hovering moth that was really a tear-stained butterfly with golden wings. He saw her for what she really was, a lost lonely fainthearted girl who was really a strong beautiful headstrong girl with a gift she should share with the world. He gazed into her thoughtful brown eyes and knew exactly what she was thinking, exactly who she was. She looked at him and saw a shy handsome boy who was stronger than he would ever know. She wanted him gone, she wanted him to stay, she just wanted something to believe in at last, and yet she wanted to remain in ignorance. She was full of distrust, she didn’t want to be hurt again, she just wanted peace. She wanted him to leave her, so that her stories could be the only thing she needed. She could control them in a way she couldn’t control him, and didn’t want to, he was free to be himself with her. She sat in the night-stained field picking flowers and feathers from the wings of angels. She wove herself a tiara of bloodstained roses with thorns made of tears and crystal hummingbirds with cold black eyes. She lay down and cried herself to sleep, her dreams nothing more than slick translucent nightmares with haunting smiles. She didn’t want to wake up, she didn’t want to sleep, she didn’t want to be alive, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t know what she wanted, she yearned for what she wanted, she wondered if he was what she wanted. Him, the boy with a golden heart and crystal eyes, so fragile she might break him with her wide-eyed openhearted whispers in his ear.

         They knew two different worlds, hers heartless and cold, his warm and sheltered. She lived in a different place than he did, she knew things he didn’t know. He wanted her to teach him, the only way she knew how. She hesitated, she wanted him to remain as pure as he was now, she didn’t want to be the one to shatter his reality. He asked her though, kept asking her to, so she taught him through her stories, her poems, her soul on paper fluttering in the breeze of angels’ sighs. She wrote for him a poem, a story, a tale, a dream, she wove herself in it unknowingly. She wove her magic into her words, her heart the paper and her blood the ink. She was her stories, she was what she said and what she wove, what she wrote. She was nothing more than the glass shards she gently treaded on, the flower petals she devoured with crazed hunger, the tears made of fallen doves she drank like white wine, the broken notes of music she sang that made her throat sore and her heart ache. She was what she said she was, she bent reality to suit herself in her stories. She made what she wanted, she erased what she didn’t want to be real, she accepted her own world because she was its creator. She didn’t want to live in this black-hearted world, where people would not hesitate to cage rainbows if only they could. Their hearts were empty, their eyes were dark, they didn’t know her and she didn’t want to know them.

         Some of them wanted her though, wanted her stories and were kind to her. She gave them her stories gladly, she wanted them to have them. They listened to her and her stories, they didn’t judge her like the others. She wove for them her magic and her life, she wove what she imagined and thought up while she stood on a street corner looking up at the velvet sky. She gave her stories to them like little gifts, wrapped up in purple ribbon and her sorrow. She didn’t realize it, but she was weaving a little of the boy, she was weaving him into her stories. The others didn’t mind, they didn’t see him staring at them from inside her stories, they were too busy seeing themselves. He thought he saw himself though, he saw his own likeness in her pages. She could only gave them enough to keep them satisfied though, she somehow couldn’t give them all of her stories. She opened her mouth, she opened her notebook to write them, but nothing came out. She tried again and again, but something was stopping her. Something deep inside wouldn’t allow her to tell them, maybe not yet. She didn’t understand, or maybe she didn’t want to understand. She closed her eyes to the truth, when she opened her eyes it was like another language, one she couldn’t learn. She just stared at it with confusion haunting her eyes. She didn’t know what to do, she just didn’t understand. After a while she didn’t try to understand anymore. She reasoned that if she needed to know, she would. She just would, if she really needed to. She didn’t worry about it, she buried it inside her mind like so many other of her memories. She didn’t want to think about it, she didn’t want to think about it, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want it to be real at all, she only wanted her stories, her jewels inside her heart, the diamonds sparkling in her eyes. She wanted her stories, she needed them and they needed her. She cradled them in her mind, she listened to them listening to her. They knew her, they knew why she did what she did, they knew why. She knew they knew, and together they lived in silence because there was no need for spoken words.

         But, then she started to miss him, she wanted the light he gave her, she didn’t care about being burned alive as long as her last moments were with him. She searched for him, she calmly left her own world behind her as she stepped into his. She looked for him until her throat was sore from calling his name, her lips were bleeding, her eyes turned to slits, her body turned to ashes, her cries short of screams. She wasn’t the same as she once was, she was alone and vulnerable, she was half of what she was and yet she was still the same girl, the same story, the same page burned crimson around the edges. She finally just sat down in the dew-covered weeds and looked blankly at the sky. She couldn’t find him anymore, he wasn’t there anymore, had he even been there at all? Maybe he was just a part of her stories, someone she imagined up to fill her loneliness, her pain, her sorrow. She couldn’t remember anymore, she just gently fingered a dead rose and cried midnight sapphires that shone in the moonlight. She wanted her boy, her angel, she needed him she knew now. He was her story, he was more than they would ever be, he was real. They were a part of her, the boy was too in a way, she needed both of them. She reached out and caught a broken star in her hands, pressing it into her palms where her stories once sat. Her hand was bleeding, her eyes were dripping, her mouth moving with unspoken words. She had lost herself, she didn’t know where she was, her stories flew away on the wind’s back. She was alone, she was frightened, she wanted her stories and she wanted him. She didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know where she was, she was inside her own head again. She watched blankly as he came over to her and gently showed her the way to where he was. He just looked into her eyes and found her there, alone maybe but still in one piece. She didn’t want anything, she didn’t want anyone, she didn’t want to be there anymore, she just wanted nothing. She looked at him, his eyes were dark but they sparkled like nothing she had ever known. She followed him willingly, she trusted him, his eyes said everything. She wrote about his eyes, his heart, his soul, his tears that shined like moonlight in his eyes. She wrote about his laugh, his smile, his cries, his warmth, his sorrow, him. She wrote about him, she wrote about herself even though she didn’t realize it. She just wrote because thought she knew what she was doing, what the world was about. The truth was, she didn’t know anything beyond her own horizon, he didn’t know anything beyond his, they taught each other what they needed to learn. She wove him, his love, into her stories, and he could see himself in them. She knew her now, she knew him now, there was no need for anything else. His arms around her shoulders, her stories in her hands, her own beautiful soul in her eyes. Finally, she knew she could give the rest of her stories, if people were willing to listen.