Pretty Facades

A Story by Tucker

     A fine facade of innocence and ignorance, the perfect mixture of fun and sweet. She seemed to catch the gaze of every passing guy with her childish dress and attitudes, and her sparkling, eager eyes.
     She would bend over backwards just to see a friend smile, and make conversation just to brighten a stranger's day.
     She played it so perfectly, and manipulated others into believing that not a care in her tiny fish bowl of a life ever existed.
     All those who came in contact with her couldn't keep from surrending their faces to smiles, and their tears to giggles, she brightened the world for all those around; and pranced all the while, in the imaginative world she resided in in her mind.
     She worked so hard to make so many happy, and no one could see past her well-played facade. She claimed she slept in the forests outside at night for fun: an adventurer she claimed, an explorer, she too, one day, would see the world.
     No one clued in when she disappeared one day, for an explorer she was, and an escape artist and disappearing act magician she had always been. She was the desirable phantom of the shadows, impossible to hold, but always near when needed. Never could she be chained to merely one place.
     They knew her by name, they knew her by smile, they knew her by attitudes and dress, and by eyes. They knew her well, and loved her more, but one would have trouble in contacting her.
     She lived in the coffee shop where they knew her by name; she lived in the forest where she knew the animals by their games. She flitted and floated and travelled by far, to the farthest cornors and reaches of the city she called hers.
     One moment she was there, and the next she was gone, melting away like a shadow into the coming onset of dusk, or a silent blackbird stretching its wings.
     Her amusing, playful disappearing act came to a tragic close one night. And everybody knew then, and everybody pulled her mask off their memories.
     No one had seen past her clever disguise, hiding so long from the reality she so dearly despised. No one had ever looked in the case of her beloved guitar, and no one had ever seen the small razor blade hidden, that would help her create her demise.
     All her life, an escape artist she had been, the mere ghost of a shadow that flitted wherever she was needed. She immersed herself in a world of her own, and bent over backwards just to see her friends smile. No one could see past the innocent, adoring smile and her three-year old mind, and in the end, all they saw was the blood of her eighteen-year old body.
     She had performed her final disappearing act, dropping forever into the shadows of the minds of those who loved her.
     And she had performed her final disappearing act of deceit so perfectly, it would never be undone, leaving those who loved her to sit and wonder: why, why had they not once merely peered into the case of her beloved, sidekick guitar?