Periwinkle Blues

This is the first part of the first chapter of a short story that I started yesterday. I have never written prose before but I thought that I would give it a try! Sorry if it is pretentious and awful!

CHAPTER ONE

Serena flung open her heavy purple curtains, peered out of her ornate wall-length window, and sighed. Another day to while away until the velvet entrapment of sleep enveloped her, and she could live once again in the realm of dreams which had become her second home. Her life seemed to be, at that moment, like a dream, in the humid hazy heat of august, alone in her house and her thoughts. Her friends had drifted away, much like she had drifted away from any ambition and she was alone, completely alone. This did not appear to trouble her, however, as she stared out at the waving fronds of marram grass and the salty air of the turbulent waters filled her lungs and her mind.

‘Alone’, she thought, after awhile, is often said to be the worst word in the English language. She did not agree with this however, as she mused that whilst you are alone you can still be content, thoughts are sometimes all the company one needs. ‘Empty’, seemed more apt to describe the vacant horror which she felt. The pretty, clinking half-melodies of the buskers and the jewel-pebbles in the sand, which she used to get so much pleasure from feeling between her toes, meant nothing to her now, they brushed over her as if they were in an alternate reality and she was alone in a grey wasteland. The sonorous songs of the sea birds which, what seems like forever ago, used to make her heart soar now go unnoticed as she dreams her days away and drinks herself into a wine-fuddled sleep filled with thoughts and images that seemed more real than the life which appeared to her to be pointless and empty. She decided, after her long apathetic stare at the horizon, that a walk was just as good a way as any to waste her time and perhaps clear the pillow-like fuddle which was currently filling her head with cloudy thoughts. Blinking, she flung on a breezy summer dress and tripped her way out of her house into the seaside street. The high street was full of charming ramshackle houses and shops in pastel colours, and since it was summer, the place was brimming with life and Serena realised just how detached she was from the teeming ant-like life of the people around her- sailing quaint little boats in the sea or eating a rum-and-raisin ice-cream, they were all completely wrapped up in their feelings of familiarity and happiness, unaware of the dangers and sorrows of life, which Serena was prone to fatally dwelling on. Dragging her feet along the pavement, the glances and stares of strangers and once-acquaintances crippled her- it seemed strange how the world which she felt like a spectre in seemed to notice her so keenly. She thought that they could see her emptiness radiating from her like gamma rays, but in reality they were staring at her fragile, limpid beauty, with her downcast violet eyes set in pale skin, her wide pink lips and the unkempt messy crop of dark hair. Because of this disarming attention, she felt an irresistible compulsion to escape, to escape from the eyes that made her feel as if she were being accosted and valued and to once again slip into solitude. Her careless, dragging walk turned into a frantic scuttle as she swiftly moved from the busy high street towards the calm of the wide beach.

Sitting in the coarse, beige sand, she thrust her head towards the sky and tried to lose herself in the periwinkle-blue and sit, in her mind, on the wisps of cloud that look so solid. She felt that her reality mirrored the futile nature of a cloud. What used to seem so stable dissolved when she put any weight on it, any real thought about her futile short life with her fickle friends and jack-of-all trades talents caused the life she had spent her youth building to falter and fall around her like a castle of playing cards. Losing herself in these thoughts, which although dreary had become to her a sort of solitude, she did not notice an inquisitive looking man sitting closer to the shore, staring at her and writing in an old leather-bound journal. Suddenly, she felt the hot gaze of this strange man boring into her, as if she were being branded, and looked up to meet his gaze. They stared at each other for an indiscernible amount of time, neither being brave enough to utter any words, but Serena felt as if she had seen him many times before, as if she knew him intimately. After a while, he looked back down at his book and resumed his writing in a scholarly fashion and Serena supposed that their eye contact was a coincidence and her strange pull to him was no different from the way she was drawn to the sea, or anything similarly rugged and beautiful.

Author's Note

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