A Work of Fiction

“It was easy to commiserate. Figuring out others and feeling for them had never been her problem. It was the inexplicable insides of her breathing existence that proved to be the hardest.” She read this line and felt a sudden soulful silence associate with her obvious soundlessness. Each book has that one line that gives you the chills every time you read it. She had found that line in this book. Flipping the page, she tried to go on but her mind kept tracing its way back to that line and finally she decided to close the book and just lie for a while. Her cranium pressed between the pillows but her mind swinging to and forth between the loose ends of that sentence. It was uncanny and a first, how she felt so lost because normally books made her comfortable. The activity of being in someone’s story where you know what’s waiting ahead and where the present has an understandable past had always given her a morbid comfort.

In evidently, she found her thoughts ooze to the root of the cause. It was her, wasn't it? Always drowned in other’s corpulent stories made up of necessary lies, manipulating her way through and reciting it to a third. But she could never fathom herself, and to top it off, she wouldn't let anyone else help her either.

What was she doing this time? What was the point of dangling between two polarized indecisive emotions and not even discussing it with anyone? But that was her. Stupid and fretful and unfair to everyone close to her.

“It was a mistake. It had been a mistake since the first day and he had dragged it so far. Looking back, all he saw was her needy innocence and how her courage stepped back more often than her heart stepped forward.” Some cosmic force in his head made him put down his book and think of that last one. A girl, of course. Not the usual type, different. A good different. He barely ever thought of her, except for those few subdued moments of guilty pleasure when she contacted him. But these lines had described her and forced his heart to concede to the fact that maybe, just maybe, he had on purpose become oblivious to her rainy efforts.

But he was like that, he accepted it. But he didn't. He simply hid his massive self-deprecation behind the covers of bold mean-boy fragility. Something he thought she had almost figured but by then it was time to run past and leave behind some nominal amount of damage. He had mostly been with sycophants. But she wasn't one. She was a big heap of pretentious wisdom hoping to keep her lack of faith in everything and everyone a secret. How well she slept each night beneath the boulder. Just like him.

But he’d been terrified by the thought of her sussing out the reason behind his shadowy walk and lifeless happiness, and so he had to just take it as slow as possible but disappear quickly. Because he was, indubitably, afraid of being loved despite his brittleness. Even though he kind of hoped for it.

And here they were, the two of them, just like the countless many, who may have passed each other on the street, finding a part of themselves in a work of fiction. And yet doing nothing about it because who wants to take risks in the dark?