Chapter Five

        Mira went to pick up Damian’s pen off the floor. He thought about stopping her, to say not to bother, but instead he just walked over by her. For some reason, he didn’t feel like he needed the pretense of being highly apologetic. She just struck him as not being that kind of person.

        "I mean, it's hard to describe," he said, "but if I had to pick a 'nicest person in the school' for some reason, I'd pick you, intuitively. I mean, it would be kind of a leap of faith, so I'd have to hope the consequence for failure wasn't... like..." he paused.

        

        She seemed to be hiding her face, just a little. And he noticed she was quite flush -- her pale skin was cherry red. Like blood, in the snow.

        

        He didn’t know where the thought had come from. But suddenly, it made him realize how beautiful she was.

        

        She was delicate, like a forest fawn; her forearms long and thin. And while she had to furrow a bit for his pen on the floor, she did so with a grace that seemed to emanate from her.

        

        Elegance… another thought came that he found he had to follow. She defined the very notion of it.

        

        And in his heart, he bounded after this word and everything it entailed.

        

        He followed her grace through the evergreens and the sheer peaks of mountains, from which descended stoic cliff sides beneath empyrean, empty skies… all before the endlessness of a world that was at once still and open.

        

        He felt as if he were a boat that had been unmoored onto the ocean, to roam in waters that were entirely disconnected from any world he had ever known. And yet those waters seemed to be filled with everything that had ever mattered to his soul… and which he had never seen before.

        

        This is what people meant by love at first sight. It was not the first time he had seen her… but it was the first time he had seen love.

        

        She handed him his pen.

        

        "Do you want to come to the garden with me?" she asked. "Later? After school?"

        

        Never in his life had he gone from wanting something so little to wanting that same thing so much. If he died in those gardens, he felt like heaven would only be about a nanometer away from the feeling lifting him up in his body as he thought about the way his soul would seek the supernal among those flowers with this girl he knew nothing about.





        Chapter Six

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter One

Day One Mira woke up early, the sun faintly lighting up the horizon where ashen clouds roamed silently over the low, distant buildings of the still sleeping town.  She felt peaceful as she inhaled and exhaled gently, her eyes drifting open to take in the blank ceiling overhead, austere but non-threatening. Then, as if following some subtle rhythm that permeated the waters of the dream world, she closed her eyes again and drifted part way back to whatever place she had just come from, whatever dream journey she had just taken. But she knew if she stayed that way too long, she’d just get drowsy… So she sighed, and pulled herself upright, imagining that she was Dracula in his coffin, and opened her eyes. Her pink, wooden dresser and the oval mirror that her grandma gave her – ringed by an ornate lattice of metal, wrought into vines – loomed behind her outstretched arms, just past the foot of her bed. “Bleh!” she said, like Dracula. And she imagined for a minute that she had never seen...
Read more

Chapter Two

Damian saw a spectral-looking girl coming down the hallway, lit in the pallor of fluorescent lights whose reflection shimmered like astral creatures in the faux-marble flooring. It was Mira. He recognized her from his acting class, and the way she always seemed… well, odd. He could never really place what it was.  After a moment, he realized he had been looking at her for an unusually long amount of time, and his mind snapped away and he began rummaging through his bag.  He pretended he was lost in the cacophony of student’s voices and slamming lockers, and that there was no world outside of his backpack, as if he had disappeared into its somewhat neatly ordered depths.  He was looking for something: a small notebook his dad had given him, quarantined in a front pocket away from the potential to be obliterated by a rogue history tome, were unseen forces to loose it to wreak havoc on everything else around it.      He noticed the world around him had grown...
Read more

Chapter Three

          Day Unknown           Aidra was far, far from home. So far that whether it was a distance in time, or in space, was a matter of semantics.           So far that home, now… meant anywhere with stars.           “Aidra…” the darkness, itself, spoke to him. “Aidra… you gave me a voice.” “Your riddle, Sphinx,” he replied.  “Aidra… It is in my body. It is in the sound your beloved world of light makes when it shouts into my cavernous heart.” “Everything flees…” Aidra said. The world and his mind broke against one another like the waves and the shoreline. “No, it does not.” “You are nothing to be afraid of,” Aidra said. “No, I am not. And I am.”           “You are all there has ever been to be afraid of?”            “I am.”            “I know your n...
Read more