Disclaimer: The Devil Wears Prada and Emily's Book of Strange belong to Lauren Weisberger, 20th Century Fox, and Rob Reger respectively. No monetary gain or disrespect intended.
Emily's Book of Strange ~
~ Emily sees the world through a tangled web ~
Emily often looked back on her childhood, though she would never admit it. She liked to remember the comfort of certain times, and the hurt of others, to remind her to keep ploughing forwards, even if sometimes it seemed as though she was fighting against a landslide.
She remembered snippets of conversation, and one thing that always stuck with her was the rhymes and sayings that her grandmother would come out with, mainly because they made no sense to her at the time. Some of them still didn't, like the parting goodbyes at the front door that always ended with 'Don't take any wooden nickels.' But some she now understood; some she had lived in; some she had observed from a distance.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
She had always liked that one, if only at first because it rhymed. She liked the structure of rhymes. She would lay in bed and repeat it over and over in her mind, not because she took the words to heart but because the lull of the mantra soothed her mind enough to sleep.
As she had grown she had learnt the meaning behind the mantra, and thought it somewhat ironic that she had always liked it, because now she lived it; her and the hundreds of others she had come to know or know of.
It started when she moved to New York – the weaving – and now, true to the saying, life was tangled. Emily lived in a complicated web, intricate patterns of false politeness and niceties, the foundations resting on denial or feigned ignorance of truth. She sometimes thought of her Grandmother, and shook her head sadly, in much the same way that she imagined her heart-mender would have done, had she still been alive.
Sometimes in the dead of night – or morning – she couldn't stop her mind from mapping the beautifully dangerous patterns of the web that had started as a single thread and that they had all managed to develop into this ever-expanding, overlapping pattern, and the thoughts would threaten to to send her into a blind panic. After all, once trapped in a web the only escape that a fly ever had was to be eaten. Or trampled. But when her thoughts turned as dark as the view from her window, she would see the web in her mind's eye, the silver tendrils reflecting and shining even when there was no light, and she would follow a thread to the edge of the centre into which she would stare, Zen-like, until her breathing returned to normal, even if her heartbeat didn't.
For the patterns, intricate as they were, all led back to the center eventually, and though the path was littered with debris, momentarily marring the fragile perfection, Emily took a masochistic comfort in the fact that Miranda Priestly was always, always, at the center.
I hope you've enjoyed this chapter. There are 12 sub-headings from Emily's Book of Strange that I am utilizing, and you may be pleased to know that I've already written it all ... just waiting for beta-ing on a couple. So the next chapter will be uploaded very very soon, as long as reviews indicate that they are wanted :)