A/N
A very character driven piece. The first couple paragraphs were just floating around in my head and it reminded me a little of the desert in Rapunzel. I wove the rest of the story to fit.
She is perfect in her unhappiness, her mouth a single perfect line curving down, her eyes, an undecided color, were silent. She did not know what her sorrow stemmed from, it was not for herself, nor was she was compassionate enough to take the world's pain as her own. Sometimes she allowed herself to cry, but even then, only a few pretty tears.
Her thoughts were vague. The scrape on her knee was bleeding; she noticed idly that the blood was mixing with dust. She wondered why the skin on the knees was always bumpier than the skin everywhere else. Perhaps, she thought, it was because peoples' knees were scraped and never healed smoothly. She considered that if this was true, babies' knees would be perfectly smooth. Memories of babies were hazy as they were generally happy creatures, and thus she did not care to think of them. There was one baby however, that she remembered. He had had the same sorrow filled eyes as her. She had wanted to reach out and touch him, say, "you and I, we are the same" but she hadn't, for she was silent, and the baby could not have understood her. And that was probably the saddest thing of all
When he saw her walking along the road, thumb outstretched, his first though was that she looked like a moon. In the dusk, her pale face seemed luminescent and her milky legs stretching from her cut off jeans seemed as white and frail as a slip of paper. When he pulled over she pretended she didn't know who he was. And he in return, pretended he didn't know who she was, pretended he wasn't in love with her. They imagined themselves as different types people. She pretended to be the sort of girl who always hitchhiked, and he, the type of guy who always picked up hitchhikers. When he asked her name, in the way any stranger would, she said "Lily," a truth. It was the first time he had heard her name from her lips, in the past he had only gathered it from town gossip. He said he was Matt, another truth. He looked over at her, the light catching on her brow bone and little jutted chin. Her white blond hair was in a loose ponytail. He remembered when it had been long. He decided he liked it better short. No, Matt took it back, he liked it both ways. Any way. When she told him to stop and let her out, he did. And when she closed the door and walked away, he didn't call out and tell her to come back. If he had, it would make no difference, and he knew that.
Lily walked on. She did not know what she was looking for, she was not seeking something to make her happy, it was more that she was searching for something to tell her that she should want to be happy. She stole spinach and Swiss chard from people's vegetable patches and ate them raw. It was a scorching summer, yet she always felt cold.
Matt went home, pretended to be things he wasn't. He pretended to be brave, to be a partier, pretended to be interested in the girls who were interested in him. Sometimes he went back to the pretend games of his childhood, pirates and cowboys.
Matt thought about Lily, and sometimes Lily thought about Matt, but not often. Sometimes she thought about her mother. It would be easy to blame her mother for her sadness, but that would be unfair, Lily came into the world sad. Her mother's overprotection had certainly not helped, but her unhappiness was not her mother's fault. Her mother believed the world would hurt her fragile child and was determined to keep the two separated. She was not to have contact with music, television, books or other children.
But Lily was not satisfied with this restrictive world. Every night her mother brushed her long, long hair, easing the knots out of the white strands. She had always been particular about Lily's hair, insisting she not cut it. And every night Lily would sneak out of her bedroom window. It was easy to do, for Lily's mother had never imagined that she would ever try to leave her sheltered life.
She would walk through the night, her path lit by the yellow streetlights. It was on one of these late night walks that she met Matt. Neither of them slept. It was one thing they had in common. They did not talk, merely observed each other walking late at night. After a week, their paths crossed. The walked a block together silently, side by side, before heading opposite directions. It became a ritual, though a word was never spoken between the two, they always walked together, on the same stretch of road before parting.
On the night that Lily left home, she cut off her hair and pinned a note to it that said, "I don't need this to protect me." She imagined her mother would cry upon discovering it, but she could not be certain.
Everyday, Lily wrote her feelings down in a small book. If you flip the pages back in time, the handwriting shifted and changed, but the word remained constant: sad. One night, she sat eating her bitter spinach, when she saw him. His sneakers were caked with same dust as her bare feet, and the faint circles beneath his eyes matched hers, as always. They had both continued to go on walks at night, the same moon hovering over them, though their paths did not cross. Their paths crossed now.
For the first time they did not imagine themselves as other people. They did not pretend to not see the other. He sat beside her. He paused. She paused. The darkness forced itself upon them, but they were silent.
"Lily" he asked, "why are you so sad?"
"I don't know"
"You don't have a reason?"
"I was born sad, just as you were born pretending to be what you are not"
"Will you be happy? Someday?"
"If I was not sad I would not be Lily." She explained. "My sadness defines me, just as your pretend games define you. When you pretend to be someone else, you are not them, you are Matt pretending to be somebody else. Without my sadness, I would not be me and you would not love me." Her years of silence had made her observant in such matters.
"I would love you the same!" he proclaimed.
"No." she said. "You would love a girl who looked like me, but inside, was not me."
"Do you think you could love me?"
She had thought about the same thing the previous day. "I don't know if it is possible to be in love and be unhappy, but maybe I will find a way. I don't want to be happy, but I am missing something. The question is, if I loved you, would you love me?"
"That is a silly question"
"It is not, right now you love me because I am unattainable. So would you love me if I loved you?" she asked again.
"I think I could manage that" he said.
He smiled. And while she did not smile (for she never smiled) she wrapped her pale fragile fingers around his. And the unhappy girl and the boy who pretended to be what he was not, walked together, there paths forever intertwined.
Fin.
The end is not quite as good as the beginning…
Comments? Criticism? All would be appreciated.
In other matters: Sweltering Sky is on hold, as my ability to write plots is a bit challenged. As you can tell from this and The Things We Leave Behind, my strength is in character.