Author's Note: This is a story I originally wrote a few years ago. After much deliberation, I decided to not get it published due to being burned out working on it. It's still pretty raw, but it holds a special place in my heart. It's the first novel I ever wrote. So I wanted to share my work here. I really hope you enjoy it and please feel free to critique it. While I love nice reviews, I want to become a better writer and sometimes that requires a little tough love. Obviously this has been slightly tailored for Twilight, but it's completely original. Also, because it's already been written, I will update twice a week- Monday and Thursday.
Happy Reading!
Disclaimer: I only own storyline, not Twilight.
PROLOGUE
I was six years old the first time I realized my future would have no real meaning. "I'm going to be a law maker," I had boldly proclaimed at the dinner table. My father's easy dismissal and my mother's 'tusk' was infuriating. "Absolutely not, you'll marry a man of means like any respectable young woman would do." And just like that, I realized my place in the world would always be under the thumb of men. It was tragic, and I hated them both for it, not truly understanding why me being a girl meant that all I was capable of doing with my life would be to sell it to another human being. Somehow, even then, I knew that in my father's eyes, I was nothing but cattle to be bartered off.
At fifteen was the second time I realized just how truly futile it was to ever dream of something different, because all it took was one moment, one horrible moment that cemented just how pointless my life truly was. At fifteen years old, right on the cusp of my coming of age, every secret hope and dream that I had desperately clung to, vanished into nothingness. And in this black void, endless dark pit of every broken dream, I Isabella Swan, became nothing.
And now, as I stand before the decrepit grandfather clock that has graced our home for nearly ten generations, I distinctly remember how much I hated it as a child. I would stare at it, feeling myself aging with every tick, propelling me forward to a future I had no desire for. All I wanted was for it to stop. And that's where the irony lays, it actually did stop, 4:17 pm and hasn't moved in over 98 years.
You know the greatest cosmic joke, I got exactly what I wanted. I am like a porcelain doll, not quite a child, and not yet quite woman either, forever frozen right on the cusp of adulthood.
Leo Tolstoy wrote "The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless." Now I haven't the faintest idea if that's true, and yet if there really is one irrefutable fact, one truth that cannot be denied, it is this: I, Isabella Swan, am nothing and mean nothing.