A long time ago (Spring 2007) I began writing a collection of short stories, or moments, descriptions if you will that I entitled "Sarah the Ghost". I stopped in 2009. This is the first one since that I think has a quality I like.


Sarah the Ghost: Recovering

Muffled voices and worried looks darting away from meeting her eyes.
Half of them would follow her into death.
The other half wanted to change her into them.

Her gaze moves from the ghosts and out the window where the trees seem so much more lush and green than she's ever seen them before. It's almost as though the colour green never existed until this spring, or that she had been blind to the colour until now, when it seems to almost flood her sensory circuits. She breathes in the fresh air and imagines herself running through the forest out there, faster than ever before; free and happy. She closes her eyes and can almost feel the cool water surround her, and hear the gentle and soft sound of the splashes as she swims.

Awake. There seems to be too much to imagine for her to stay in this one moment that apparently is reality. A voice in her head answers this sudden thought that, although this is true, she does feel and sense more in the real world. It's just that the real world seems so much more real to other people. She still has the doubts she's had since she was 8 years old, that she could be imagining it all, or that it's all some strange non-existence and that she herself does not really exist at all. Or maybe that the very notion of existence is some strange paradox that is way beyond her own understanding, and that they all live in a mix of moments of existence and non-existence. She cuts herself off with a smile as the thought becomes too complex to trap into words, and turns back to the lush trees outside her window.

Here in this blue room that is not quite hers yet, she finds herself in some strange twilight mood, as though the moment before a great choice is given to the chooser. Choosing not to float away so far that she cannot find back to herself or to life. She wonders if they could ever know or understand that she was so close to the brink of giving up, that she leaped into it with her whole self and still came out of it, surprised that she had the wings to fly.

A much too many times silenced part of her stirs and gloomily stares at her. "I tried", she answers those blaming eyes. Angry. Angry that she couldn't just lash out in destruction and pure, insatiable, delicious desire. Angry that she did not listen when I yelled at her what she refused to see. "Jealousy" she calls me. "Protector" I answer. She pushes me back down and away and forgets that I need her too. How can I protect someone that will not share or take me with her?

She closes her eyes as a flash of something she will never share passes through her. A glimpse of a delicious man enraptured with her, loving her in the deep, enduring and insatiable way she cannot dismiss. A sigh she lets go, a wish that she could be able to let go and love in that way again, but feels the walls inside her. Those cold and damp walls.
Fire. A raging fire is what he should be. A raging inferno of a man in complete control of that ever-burning and deep fire. Not some surface flame - doomed to flicker and shift and ultimately succumb, but white-hot coals, burning deep and hot and to the core of him, only to be blown alive by the breath of those Words, and by the look of her eyes upon who he really is.

She falls upon her bed. Closing her eyes and trying to forget the imagined memory of a man she's never known. Her life now, existence or not, is learning to live alone and love plenteously.




Short story by SecretWords The PoetBay support member heart!
Read 601 times
Written on 2012-06-07 at 01:03

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