themittenkitten
"Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows." Except her. She knows, because she's done this before. She's done all of this before. She has lived her entire life already, from start to finish, and it reliving it now, only mere moments from her death. Funny, isn't it? We imagine our lives flashing before our eyes -- but what if it played at the same pace as you experienced it?
It starts the same as any story starts: with a person in distress.
She's running through the streets, her feet slapping against wet pavement. A car rolls by, she jumps out, trying to get it to stop. It swerves. She screams as she watches it go. She stops and cries, and the rain mingles with the tears on her face. Her hair is a mess. Her clothes are soaked. She lost her shoes a quarter mile back. She is tired, and has given up on running.
She died that day. That's how she became the hero of this story.
My mom would take us to the temple and she would light the incense sticks one by one, and give each of us our own. I always liked playing with the smoke. No one seemed to mind that we didn't use the incense the way it was meant, so long as we kept quiet, and we kept out of the way, we could draw bunnies and birds in the air as much as we wanted. As we got older, and we started to actually internalize what the temple was for, that changed. But sometimes I still like to draw a flower, and imagine it as my gift to the gods.
The blade went down the line, one quick and smooth motion, the man's face pressed against the table as he did so. He lifted himself. Turned the page. Lowered himself. Cut again.
I've had it up to here with this. I want out. I've done all that I can, I've tried everything that I can try. "But try more, you have to try more." What more is there to try? How much do i have to do just to get the basics in life? To get food and water, sure, I can work for that. But what about love? What about respect? How much harder do I have to work to get those? Shouldn't I have them just because I'm human?
The rocks lay still, silent, covered by a rush of thin clear river. Most were no bigger than any given toe. Merida bent down and poked at them, quickly, never letting her fingers lay too long in the cold mountain water. "Do you see something?" she heard her commander ask. Merida felt a longing to remain.
"No," she said, standing. "I only thought I did."
Music playing softly, drifting through the chambers until it reached him as a faint echo of what it had been. He starts, leaves his work and his disaster, follows the song until he reaches the source.
She is playing quietly, softly, only for herself. He leans in the doorway. She does not know he is there.
The empty space between that is filled with ideas and emotion; passion, love, hate, lust, friendship, happiness, depression. It is what fills in the gaps between this and that, how two beings interact, what is sent across the cosmos from me to you.
Distance. Land. What comes next. What mysteries are out there? What's beyond what we know? Hope, reaching, grasping, go for it, then go farther and farther, always your destination, never reached, but always there telling you not to stop, you haven't finished yet.