inspired by the stories I keep reading by another author on this sight...they are so good at parentheses.
emptiness
The emptiness stretches across the deserted desert and she wonders why some cactus bloom with flowers and why some don't (some get what they want and others never get what they need). The music blaring in her ears is ignored; she doesn't mouth the lyrics anymore (she's done with music, the lies it tells) but sits and waits and stares with empty eyes out to the emptiness of the empty plains, empty, empty, empty. The emptiness is fulfilling (she knows the thought is oxymoronic but her whole life is these days), it heals her, it calms her thoughts, it soothes her mind, it destroys her insomniac tendencies and allows her to sleep even as she's awake.
She wishes she'd brought the book with her, the one that only speaks to her now (this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper). He does everything to justify and clarify the world, oh yes; he clarifies everything, never told lies (everybody lies). The echoes of random thoughts careen across her brain and ask and wonder and wait and watch and cry and wither and die and oh God why don't they stop…
The music changes; her background is the murmur of voices, the diagnostics of medicine which she loves and hates at the same time but it's the only thing that keeps her focused ("Could be tic paralysis…") and the headphones blare and the emptiness in her eyes grows even as the thoughts swell and break, swell and wither, swell and die, the process is vicious, the cycle unending, it repeats itself over and over and over again, it never stops, it never shall.
(Oh, do not ask, "What is it?")
She's been asking for years now, before she even knew the question, pleading for the answer, wondering what it all means, the meaning of life couldn't possibly be so simple (42 isn't even a perfect square root).
(Let us go…)
"Cameron?"
(…then, you and I)
She asks for hope and gets pain (oh, beautiful pain, if only they knew, the shadow on the wall beside her screams that pain is so much better than pleasure) and she never wanted anything else.
(And through the spaces of the dark)
The glaring sunlight is fading, going down behind her empty eyes and as the night comes alive the thoughts become more vivacious, too…
(Midnight shakes the memory)
Midnight shakes a thousand memories, a thousand regrets, a thousand, million, billion moments of unhappiness, of darkness, of the times when it was over, all over, but she was forced to her feet again, forced to keep going even though she cried out for mercy, "Let me give up…!"
(As a madman shakes a dead geranium.)
Her life, a dead geranium in her hands, reflects in her empty eyes.
(Now her life is lifeless enough to be that dead geranium – emptied of the hundred thousand regrets, unhappiness, and the times when she was ripped apart and put back together again.)