of Stardust and the Beasts

With her fingers lightly gripping the quill, the black ink smeared on her fingers and across the paper, if I may paint her clumsiness and lack of etiquette, she tried to write him another letter. But what was there for her to write about? After all, they had never met. She had seen him once from the crowd as she watched his fingers dance across the keys of a pianoforte while clutching her mother’s hand to calm her nerves.

I used to believe in something, like stars being the souls of the lost—my father being one of them. I also used to read fairy tales over and over again. I believed that I would spend an eternity loving the same boy I fell for when I was nothing but a child. I had my whole life written in fantasy and laid out in front of me. On some days, I fought dragons; on other days, I cradled the scorching sun in my arms and called it a lover.

How many times in my life have I felt completely overwhelmed by the tide of emotions and the ensuing silence of a depression that could incapacitate even the strongest of men? Some say it is the natural flow of life. “There is beauty in the ups and downs” —but I feel as if I am in the sea, desperately keeping myself afloat.

Only to be engulfed by the tide behind.

The smell of cinnamon in the room, a burnt candle on the bedside table, an empty bottle of Shiraz on the floor beside the ivory bed, and finally… a lady clutching onto a tattered book while tangled in her silken sheets with a tear running down her cheek.

I prayed that the wooden floorboards wouldn’t creak under my weight as I  got out of the bed, because God knows that hell had no fury like her majesty awoken suddenly from her slumber.

She could feel that something was wrong with the way the wind made her skin crawl as she teetered out from the bar onto the small alleyway leading to her home and she felt almost as if there, in the dark, were a pair of eyes watching her every move.

At night, when Ember lies down in her bed and listens to the rain softly running down her skylights she travels the worlds unknown to men. 

Tonight was no exception; she was running in a maze to find her prince, a man she hardly knew but a face he had.

Ellie found it easier to cope with the world by slowly removing herself from it, she had a superpower of cooking up wonderlands in her head and falling in love with strangers as she built them into magical characters in her stories and poems.

As the reality seemed to shun her out and strike her with a pike into her heart she fell in love with words, as if the blood dripping from the end of it was a pitch-black tint tainting her poetry with pain and sorrow as she crafted her words into bullets that could make a grown man shed a tear.

Evan didn’t know how long he had been lying there with his arms crossed on his chest and the sandalwood incense burning his nostrils,  to him it seemed as if the flow of time had slowed down or didn’t exist altogether and even if he could hear the clanging of what appeared to be dishes in the next room – he hadn’t moved much since he lost his sight and the seer had led him to a bed.

Evan could have done with a little more luck but it was as if he had been on a stroke of misfortune his whole life, maybe that is why he found himself on that chair knuckle cracking and waiting for the seer to give him something.

Perhaps a new faith in the set of Gods to make his life better – a rune to magically make him fall in love with the world, a potion or a numbing cream for his aching soul, something, anything to make him feel like a human being again.

It was as if he was venturing into the halls of an old abandoned building and as he stood there on the door frame, clutching a key in his sweaty palms, he couldn’t help but be perplexed at the fact that anyone could ever show such neglect to something so majestic.

“Just leave, you are not wanted or needed around here.”

These words haunt me in my dreams to this day, as vividly and loudly as cruelly as they were, and I can still see their faces clearly or hear the piercing laughter as I was laying on the floor with my peers forming a ritual circle around me while throwing words shaped like daggers into my flesh- sometimes I am even afraid to fall asleep, as in my 30ties I still relive the moment like a veteran of war.

“You are a weird one, aren’t you?”

His words echoed in my brain as I had been decrypted and my secrets, they flung from the pages onto which I had been painting my love for him – with droplets of the sweetest words that I had accumulated over the years.