Disclaimer: Harvest Moon is of course not mine! :)
Note: Hello! Here's my entry for the Village Square's latest Writing Contest – the theme was 'Sunlight and Shadows.' It's my very first Keira-based story. To be honest, I've never given her a second though before now. Excuse the fact that it's extremely short. I intended it to be and found that I preferred it short; I didn't want it to get longwinded when I'd already said all I had to say. So... enjoy!
Entrapment
He thinks he's freed me – all of me. He hasn't quite.
In body, maybe, but not in mind.
I don't speak and so I don't quite fit. Everyone stares. This makes me hide away. I retreat into his strange, sterile house and into myself.
It doesn't feel like the freedom he promised.
He said that I was too beautiful to live in shadows. He said I needed to wake up and step into the sun. He said so many things, while I said nothing at all.
My hair is as long as my own imprisonment and as black as the darkness that once surrounded me. He – Jack – pushes it back from my face as we stand together, free. It's the first time I've been touched by daylight in so very long... "Isn't it stunning?" he says, gesturing around the valley. "Aren't you lucky?" He thinks a hundred years of shadows can be eclipsed by one blistering, sunlit moment.
Shadows are safety and familiarity and the world I find myself in is too bright. It hurts.
Jack, I find, is kind, but needy. He worries about me day after day after day. I soon realise that it's just another cycle, like sleep and shadows. And it's endless.
Because I won't get 'better.' I'll never change. Every time I reach for my pen and paper, I hear his sigh and see the shadows move across his face. I recognise his growing disappointment.
He thought I could be his trophy – his Princess, another precious jewel from the mine.
It doesn't work like that. I see the derision grow in the eyes of the other women when I refuse to open my mouth. I know they're sneering at 'the girl who thinks she's too good for mere conversation.'
So I sit in his house – 'ours,' he reminds me, 'ours' – alone. I keep away from sunlight, away from judgement. I sit on the edge of his – 'our' – bed and watch a world I can never understand through the window pane. I see the glare of summer die in the autumn. Round and round, I see the seasons melt into each other. It's just another cycle. Seasons change, but I'm frozen. I watch them through the window pane and think that I don't belong.
He thinks he's freed me. I'm more trapped than ever.
