Solitary Sounds and Insensitivities

Original.

The doorbell rings. A solitary sound in a world of black and white.

Her life is typical at best, the same notions each day, her repetitive actions causing her life to slowly dwindle away. She tries her hardest to break free of the bonds that hold her back, the everyday occurrences that plague her very mindset. She has no real friends; her only ones abandoned her long before she slipped into a world of nothingness. Her world is vacant to outsiders, seen only as a life of oblivion, sheer in color.

They cannot see inside her mind, inside the empty shell left over from years of torment, plagued by grief and heartbreak. They only see how she keeps steadily to herself, shying away from school-wide activities; content to stay hidden behind her well-loved notebook.

She welcomes the solitude, basking in its comfort. But that comfort can only extend so far.

Behind her words, she is lost. She yearns to feel the missing piece returned; the emptiness filled.

She cannot see the sunlight, her eyes glazed over. A film covers her gaze, barring it from the warm embrace of the sun. She is lost in a nighttime of darkness, unable to break free. Her only solstice, her only vice, is to write. She lets free her endless emotions, bringing forth words she only wished she had the courage to speak out loud. Gripping her pen tightly, she struggles to let out all the emotions she has kept locked inside.

Words pouring forth, they cover every inch of the paper. Her sprawling handwriting stains the bright white pages inky black. She rushes to fill every crevice, not bothering to withhold her emotions any longer. Her hands shake, and she struggles to get every word put before they become damaged from memory delay. When she is lost, she turns to her kind of therapy, forced to express her feelings through writing; forced to confide in a single black notebook, five cents at any drug store.

The others, they don’t see the real girl, the one that grief claimed. They only see an empty shell, a memory of a spirited girl. They think that girl is gone, lost the day the visitors arrived, bearing the worst news she had ever heard. She never told, afraid to let herself believe it.

She blocked everyone out, expecting someone to be willing to break through the barriers, willing to fight to get in, to understand, to comfort.

No one did; they left her to stand on her own two feet. She collapsed, unable to withstand the weight. She hasn’t been able to get up since, lost in her own misery. She can’t seem to let it out, no matter how much the words strain against her. Struggling hopelessly against her own mind, she doesn’t have the strength, nor the incentive to break free. The one thing she needs the most is someone to care for her, someone to be there to take the brunt of some of her pain. She needs the person who was uncharacteristically taken from her, mercilessly ripped from her grasp without warning.

If they bothered to look past the seemingly empty girl, past the barriers unintentionally put up, they might be able to make some sense of it all. None of them bothered to ask why she locked herself away in her emotions. They didn’t want to send their own lives into disarray, corrupting their perfect lives with the pain of another. Too selfishly contained in their own little worlds, they lost sight of the girl she used to be. They chose rather to forget the once cheerful, once amazingly bright girl, letting instead, a ghost of a girl instill in their lost friend.

Forgotten and abandoned, she finds herself unable to unleash her emotions free. She blocks them up, erecting impenetrable labyrinth, unknowingly removing herself from the world.

She writes furiously, words filling up the once cream page, the only time her true emotions escape. Scribbling madly, she reaches the end of a page, another, then another, and so on, until she has written eight pages lie across her desk. Taking a second glance at them, they disgust her. Without a second thought, she rips them from the notebook, crumpling each piece separately, ensuring that each piece is unrecognizable before picking her pen up again to begin. Starting anew, her [slides down, visual damp hand grips the blue plastic pen. Clamping down tightly, she begins writing again, letting out every emotion that comes
to mind. Her eyes tear up in remembrance of the one night that changed her life.

She hardly remembers the doorbell ringing, and her reluctance to leave her writing, having suddenly found inspiration dawned. She, however, clearly recalls the pity and sympathy marring the faces of the officers; the very ones who destroyed her life with one sentence.

The voice of the tall man rings out in her mind, allowing her to replay the memory time and time again. He uttered those two words, simple words, launching her world into oblivion. Downward spiral.

She shut that thought out, forcing herself back into the present. She had relived that night many times, too much for it to be healthy. She wiped away the tears that had fallen, more still gathering in her eyes, pooling at the corners. Her gaunt face was sunken in, dark circles ringed her eyes. She was forgotten, and in the absence of love, she had let herself go to waste. Her long dark hair fell limply at her sides, her eyes dark and wistful, full of pain. She yearned for someone to notice her, but knew it was now impossible, so she immersed herself in her writing.
_____________________________________________
On a day that started like all the others, she dove into her writing, losing herself in volumes of syllables and paragraphs, trying to make sense of the jumbled contents of her mind.

Huddled in the corner, she exiled herself, not noticing the new set of eyes on her.

He saw her sitting there, staring blankly into space. He noticed how tightly she clutched the
worn notebook to her chest. He wondered what happened, what tragedy had occurred to make her fold inwards like that. He wondered how they all missed it, choosing instead to shun her. They absentmindedly pushed her deeper into her darkness.

He studied her as she stared. He returned his gaze downwards, only for his eyes to flick towards her again. He was startled to see her green eyes filling up with tears. He watched as she blinked them away, looking down swiftly at her papers. She tore them from their bindings, and tossed them away from her. He watched wordlessly as he saw her begin again with new fervor, only to be stopped by the wave of tears that came rolling down her cheeks.

He started, catching himself as she watched her slowly gather her belongings and head out of the classroom, ignoring the remaining 20 minutes until the bell. Curiousity overran him, and he went and picked up one of the papers, unfolding it. His eyes skimmed over the furiously written words, taking in all of her emotions in one wave.

His eyes widened in realization, his body tensing up with shock. Disbelief clouded his eyes as he took in her words. He opened his mouth, but found his voice strangled. He thought back to where he first noticed the change taking place. He remembered how she started to rely less on people and more on the notebook. They all only saw how she turned them away, ignoring them, and eventually becoming a mar on their perfect worlds. So they cut her out, taking her lack of love as disinterest, when really all it was happened to be a cry for help.

Taking her lead, he cut out of class, ignoring the questions that came shooting at him from behind. From memory, he made his way to her house.

The doorbell rings. A solitary sound in a world of black and white.

The door swings open, revealing on one side, a boy whose bright eyes are brimming with understanding, while on the other, a girl whose eyes have lost all color, deadened with pain.

She stares at him, confused how after all this time, he still knew the way to her house.

He stares at her, finally understanding the look in her eyes to be pain, and not resentment
or anger.

The two are motionless, one on each side of the barrier.

Black. And White.
It is the way it has always been, without any medium, no space left for gray.

One move, in a swirl of black and white, a new color appears. A brilliant hue no one can ever describe, yet they sum it up in one word.

He moves across the threshold, breaking all of the barriers to embrace her. He wraps his hands around her, letting her bury her head into his shoulder. Her body wracked with sobs as he held her tightly.

She only needed one person to understand, one person to care enough to break down the walls.

He pulled from his back pocket the paper, the one she had discarded in a fit of pain and anger, distastefully tossed aside. It was neatly folded now, he hadn’t wanted to disturb it anymore. He slipped it into her awaiting hand, and watched as she clutched it tightly, a new wave of tears occupying her eyes.

She glanced up at him, her eyes a startling green.

He cleared his throat, struggling to find the words to say what was on his mind, finally settling with the very two words that had taken her down all those months ago.

“I’m sorry.”

She spoke, trembling at first, using her voice properly for the first time in months.

“I miss her. I miss my mom.”

She dissolved into tears again, but this time, there was someone there to hold her up, someone who broke past all the barriers she put up. He took a step away from the ordinary, the black or the white, caring enough to remember who she was, and to care about where that girl had gone.

Author's Note

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