The Sides to a Coin

She was sure she was unafraid of that glance. In his voice, there had always been that something she knew she was dying to hear. She couldn't point it out or explain it in as many words as she could if they asked her to do it. When she looked at him, she simply knew.

He was afraid of her simplicity, of the enormous amount of things she had yet to know. When he looked at her, her beauty was the war he fought in but was the purpose he grew easily tired of loving. Beyond anything else he knew about her, there was only the one glaring thing that was so evident only by its absence: She was, as he learned gradually and most of all painfully, incapable of making sense.

She thrived blindly in his presence until she lost the thread that used to hold her firmly on the ground. More than anything she could be reassured of, his love would last long enough to sustain them until the next holiday. If it wasn't there anymore by that time she could be counted upon to make up for it, down to the last drop of her strength. She would emerge victorious. In many ways, he made moves to attest to that. The only thing that complicated matters was time.

Time alone with her, however, rapidly turned into the last thing he could ever wish for. His words became candid, his melody disappearing to a fearful, unleveled silence. He felt no impulse to continue this war: he had seen all that he had to and found the prize not worth the sacrifice after all. Where his mediocrity should bother him, he only caught himself wishing he had seen through her from the start.

The following morning witnessed a heavy sunlight. She felt herself pining for his manhood, there in the stillness of the barren sheets she lay on. She remembered the last thing she would ever hear from him, wishing she misheard it all, and saw the end many times over. Her war began here.

An Emo Story

She was an old hand at falling out of love, the inconvenient necessity of living guarded by much hypocrisy as one finds nowadays. The mighty have fallen at her feet only to remind her of what she was bound to be: a failing purpose for romance and a sorry excuse for progress.

The leaves had fallen in her alma mater; the colors sublimated to a degree; the buildings stood erect, whitewashed to the hilt merely to serve originality the notice it deserved. What should've been the cultural basis for its former grandeur was lost to no clarified reason, but no hearts broke ever sincerely enough to throw any comment its way. Philosophy and sentimentally rooted regards were hard to come by in those days and if one dwelt on it long enough, he'd sure, in no level of depth, find all this immaterial to him. Memories or loss thereof alone could never fully account for nostalgia, for it's a feeling that lacks concrete identity, its components long lost in the dictionary of a thousand other cliches.

She remembered a past that was so sadly disappointing no word could quite put a measure on it, no demonstration would come close if it means charades were the most "in" medium. If it satisfied her conscience to just let it go or otherwise bury it along with the remains of Plato and Aristotle, she didn't openly state it. She handled her secrecy with dignity and not with the strenuous effort a convalescent heart demanded; above the surface, there was only the inadequate proof of pain. She wondered if it mutuality existed in his case as in other matters; she always tended to think that she alone ached for ruin and destruction, mistakes and thoughtless follies. In fact, such as it was, she would never know: her pride would never permit it. Her mind and groin acted very distinctly from each other anyway, so why pay any attention to the heart that had never failed to fail her?

And she had seen way better days, every day of the present costing her every ounce of her sanity. There were lapses of unknown silence, perhaps moments weaved in guilt, not for what she did but for what she did not do, which simply amounted to having failed to put things in the right. She looked in the mirror and saw none of the assertive face of the girl she expected to see, but of one so tired of talking about herself. She wanted to censor her thoughts from outside standards, those evils fighting to do her wrong. Still, shutting herself in her room didn't quite ensure its success and neither did shading herself from sunlight and nature in general.

At times she attempted to acquire contentment in solitude, those weren't simply impulsive moments of delusions. Those might have contained aims to permanence. She waited for phone calls that rarely ever came. When the best friend defined emotional dependence, she tried to nod and at this, the former's point was half taken. Indeed, being alone is no worse than vouching for one's life's futility, encouraging it in a most conscious manner. She learned the hard way, as everyone must at some point in his life, though this she didn't wholly deserve. It was way too much. Pain and its antagonistic force had no right to enter her world of shelter, to shock her to an inch of her life and leave her undone with humiliation. It was but an unfought war, a story of abuse whose victim was a young person wanting in both foresight and perspective. There was no weapon against it, but a forfeit would prove to be a ridiculous and hence, an impossible option.

In substance, she had learned her lesson. Among other things, she realized that friends are methodically lost along the way and sometimes, for no reasonable reason. She held a critical interest in such phenomenon; that life is unkind is a great point of interest, even more so the treatment one uses as his arsenal to face so harsh a reality.