The World Shatters

Sometimes a world shatters, when you thought it was just a crack.

There once was a girl. A girl whose life was lived between the pages of books. Her childhood filled with tales of mystical beasts, her growing years marked more by the turning of pages than the turning of the earth around the sun.

The great emotions, she had thought, were there. Ink spilled across pages, pain, hope, joy, love, sorrow, fear, all of it, she'd thought, written there, as painful as it ever could be. She imagined herself an island among them, or, perhaps, an observer trapped on the other side of a pain of glass. So close to feeling the whole, a hands-breadth away from these great emotions, riding the crest of each wave to the safety that was her life. Her pleasantly happy home, her family never destitute enough for her to truly understand starving, the events of her life, while not always enjoyable, still a safe distance from the pain held in the pages of her books.

She'd thought herself safe. She'd thought the stories would never be truly understood. She'd thought she could never relate to those things written in her cherished books.

She had been wrong.

All it had taken was one day, a few short hours, when it went from "alright" to "terrible". Within a week, she was faced with things she'd thought were still a lifetime away. Two short years after that first day, nothing would be the same. A voice heard, pointing out things she normally wouldn't have seen. A memory of times and places playing at the wrong time. Everywhere reminders of things she'd never see. Every day full of the things that wounded her.

And her books. Her precious books. Safe-havens though they once were, they were ruined, tainted by this open wound. Words she'd thought harmless cut her through to the core. Ink left behind vivid stains through her mind and heart, the pain a surprise where she'd thought she was safe.

She'd never have though it, once upon a lifetime ago, that two short sentences could bring her to her knees. She really should have seen it coming, a father getting sick, a chess set bought for him a gift. But she hadn't seen those two phrases that cut like a knife, that left behind trails of blood no one but she could see.

"I see you there, everywhere I look. I see you there."

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Life often changes; calm one minute and tumultuous the next. Ride out those storms, we must, or else drown. Very good writing, Corza. I think there's a misspelling here--"tainted by this open would.."