White Light and Shards Bright

Stephen Sparks

The tears you cry are not your own, and the blood you shed is not yours. The fear, the terror that defines you—they proceed from a place you could never touch, a place that birthed your soul ex nihilo. Your loves, your affections, and every sweet stroke of innocence that typified your existence in the days that live only in your memory, have all but faded away. If there is anything at all left of the person you once mistook yourself to be, I shall be there to kill her.

When you were young, you loved hatred. Your innocence hid truly evil acts that were performed in the land of roaming shadows. Looking into the mirror half-shattered by your then bruised and bloody fist, you saw the person you loved to hate the most. Her blonde hair paled in contrast to the dark eyes that returned the gaze from whence their reflection came. The supercilious expression the girl wore failed to detract from the unambiguous fear she had of remaining this way forever.

A transvaluation of everything you knew spawned a fuller crack in that ghastly mirror. Finally you melted all traces and shards that had lay—seemingly harmless—on the floor. You picked them up upon my quiet suggestion, and threw them carefully and intently into the fire. Along with the shards you discarded your very self, because nothing that has not died can be reborn. Your new soul found a new fear, a terrorless and loving reverence for a person removed from the pain and sting of yesterday's unnecessary suffering.

And now the tears you cry comfort you, because they come from another place, and the blood you shed does not alarm you, because it is to another. Your old innocence has been replaced with real purity, and the love you once knew has been killed off. Never again will you find love in the wish of self-mutilation. The final shard tears through the past that never lived up to its potential, which has been realized in the momentary Today.

Emergent wings and whiteness cascade over your person, and you finally see yourself for you. Nothing hinders your vision any longer. The perception is no longer flawed, nor is the reality. There is no more question of what is or is not. At last you can rest assured that it is over, and it is done. The tears have solidified—crystals trailing behind you. The blood is clear. Your skin is white, and your countenance bright.

The best day of my life was in vain, for the days that followed swallowed it whole.