Filed under: La Fiction, Pensation | Tags: black, good and evil, grey, little girl, rose-colored glasses, skinned knee, white
Why is the world so full of people? They disgust me. I disgust myself. I ran around for so long with great ambitions. I spouted words of wisdom and stirred people’s hearts. They didn’t want their hearts to be stirred or redeemed, though. I found that out the day everything snapped. I wanted to believe that good things happened. I told everyone that good things happened. But they don’t. I was foolish and wrong and I lied to myself each time I smiled. I was innocent and I thought everyone else was too. He showed me how wrong I was. He said he loved me, but he stole my rose-colored glasses and left me there alone to bleed. All that was left for me to see was black, white, and grey. I didn’t even cry. I didn’t know how anymore. I didn’t want to face the evil, so I made a way around it in my mind. How could I feel evil if it didn’t exist? That day, I decided that nothing was evil, and I guess that meant nothing was good either. Everything just was, and I was ok with that. That’s how I lived and I liked it that way.
There was a little park between where I worked and my house. I used to stop there on my way home everyday. I wanted to watch the children play. Even with my new and numbing philosophy, I felt like the children knew something I didn’t. Nothing seemed to trouble them. Had I been like that once? I hated to think of the day when they would discover the truth that I had found. That their lives of joy and innocence were only fragile creations of their imaginations, little worlds that their praying mothers had spun to catch them where they fell.
Everyone knew I didn’t belong there. I guess I knew it too. How could I not know it after hearing it screamed at me through their eyes everyday? It didn’t matter, though, it didn’t hurt because it wasn’t evil, and that was the most beautiful part of my new little world. Eventually, I stopped going to the park, though. It was no different from the rest of the world.
But something struck me one day. I still can’t get it out of my head. Let me run it by you and see what you think. It came to me when I was trudging home from work one day and I passed by the same old park that I’d always visited. A father was screaming down at his little daughter. She lay in the gravel, cradling her skinned knee. The little girl was sobbing. Her pink pants were torn and stained with blood from her knee and she begged, “Daddy, there’s gravel in my knee, it stings so bad! Please, Daddy, make it stop!”
He bellowed at her and cussed. It was all her fault. If she wasn’t so clumsy she wouldn’t have fallen.
“It’s not my fault, Daddy. I was just playing and he tripped me. He told me I was his best friend in the whole world, but he laughed when I fell and then he ran away and it stings so bad! Why would he do that, Daddy? Why do people do mean things?” The man sighed in distain. He gruffly commanded her to stop crying and get up as he turned to walk away. She pulled herself up and limped after him, sobbing and sniffling between steps. I knew exactly how she felt. How dare he? It wasn’t her fault that she’d been hurt. It wasn’t her fault the boy had hurt her. I started with a dertermined step to stop this injustice, but the little girl froze me dead in my tracks. As she hobbled behind him, she picked up a crumpled little white flower. She limped as fast as she could and raced to stick the tragic little weed in his fist, offering a hopeful little smile up at him through her puffy eyes.
I turned away and left as fast as I could. I didn’t want to see what would happen next, the inevitable. I knew he would throw the flower down and trample it. That’s just what people do, I said to myself. These two were no different than anyone else in the world, I said, and I dismissed it. Or at least I tried to. Something just didn’t sit right in me, though. Suddenly my outlook didn’t seem to fit. If nothing was good or evil, if everything just was, then why was something wrong with that scene? Why did I feel such outrage at the father and the little boy if they were just being? And why was I in such awe of the little girl with her little white flower?
I had been slapped in the face by Good. I didn’t want to admit that good existed, because then I would need to feel the evil. I didn’t want to live in a world where both black and white lived, because then, I thought, I would need to face the grey.
The little girl with her little white flower shocked me, though, and taught me something very important: Grey is a good thing.
Grey is made when someone carries white into the black.
Filed under: La Fiction | Tags: ambition, memories, mirror, park bench, shatter, sidewalk
A trail of glittering fragments drew the passerby’s brisk eyes to this bench where the hours rolled backwards. Tired weeds pushed their determined heads through the concrete cracks, too weary to reach any higher than this weatherworn bench. They had no reason for ambition. Competition doesn’t exist in the absence of time. Here, the rules were different. The paint draped in heavy layers, layers weighted with countless stories just like hers. Having no stories of its own, it seemed to cling to every sliver of life it was brought, reliving them at night within its aged grains until they became a part of it. Here was a new story to add to its folds. Maybe in the morning she would remember something pleasant; that is if the mirror hadn’t broken. Many faces had been held in that mirror. Many lively faces. Her sister’s husband gave it to his cherished bride on their honeymoon in Vienna. He told her it could never capture her beauty but maybe it could hold her memories for her so she could relive them on a darker day. She had taken it to heart, depositing in it reflections of her full life. Her life had allure and vivacity. It had the passion of their love and the innocent eyes of their flaxen-haired daughter. Now, though, no more memories of laughter and life would be added. Tragedy had struck and three stars had burned out. Now this brilliant lens had passed to this lonely lady with no memories of her own to keep her warm at night. She had thrived off of her sister’s crystallized memories, alone in her mundane days that rolled into years that rolled into ages. Somehow, she felt less hollow when she could look into this mirror and pretend the memories were hers. Somehow the emptiness didn’t echo as sharply. It didn’t pierce as swiftly.
Now she sat on this time-frozen bench. Her hollow eyes stared through the shattered glass panel, watching the weeds’ not growing.
An acorn fell from a branch above and invaded this sacred, separate, untouchable shrine. It bounced beside her off of the aged bench boards, cracking in half. A hollow clunk drew her attention from the shattered world she’d known. Her joints creaked as she turned to watch the catalyst roll across the path into the warm sunlight and disappear into the thick moist grass. She sat on a hollow bench. A bench that had never moved. Carvings of love and memories tattooed its shell, but the inside had been eaten away by time. Hope for the bench was lost. Even here where time was ignored, it took its toll.
She looked back at the shards clutched in her hands. Each one twinkled with tempting tales of exotic lives that she had never lived. She had never lived. Cradling this cracked crutch, she slowly placed it beside her on the hollow bench and pulled herself up to her feet. Each inch ached with age, but she set out across the path, aching more to soak up the smooth sunrays. Feeling this heaven on her fragile face, she turned slowly to see her old bench with her old mirror. It seemed to sit back in the shadows like a sullen child. Satisfied, she set off, step by purposeful step, across the field. Maybe it was not too late for her. Maybe she wasn’t past hope. Maybe he could still make a memory of her own tonight. Maybe in the morning, she wouldn’t be hollow.
