This was written for a Drabble-a-Thon over at the Twilight LJ community. Just more philosophical ponderings, basically. LOL
These characters are not mine. They belong to Steph Meyer, and they always will.
White
White is not the absence of color, negative space waiting to be filled.
She realizes this when she notes her ivory hand in Jacob's russet one, how they are two wholes converging rather than one whole completing. In the same strand of logic, joy is not the absence of sorrow and pain: she has known nothingness well enough to recognize the difference. Good is not the absence of evil. Light is not the absence of the dark.
And more important than all the rest, life is not the absence of death.
Life is not merely perpetuating, cold and crystallized, when everything else has crumbled into dust. It is a separate thing entirely, a million small things that miraculously compile into everything.
It is warm soda cans in an old garage, Charlie's botched attempts at a birthday cake, Renee's flurry of e-mails when she's worried about her, two dark-haired children running into the forest, the wizened visage of her grandmother in the mirror. Life is the sunlight that turns her hair dark red, the air that fills her lungs, the blood in her veins and the heartbeat in her chest.
This, in the end, is what she realizes, as she notes her pale hand against Edward's even whiter one: how she is only one half of a whole when she is with him, how she has come to define herself by his existence.
And that, in the end, is what brings Bella Swan back to Jacob Black's doorstep, brown-eyed and stumbling as she sets her suitcases down. The lace cuff of a wedding dress is caught in one of the zippers.
"Well," she says to the man in front of her, "here I am."
Love is not the absence of choice: it is merely the right one.
Thanks for reading! Reviews and critique are encouraged!
