Effigy of the Lonely
Where are you from? Greenwich, CT
Religion? Christian
Ethnic background? Caucasian
Do you think of yourself as different? Yes
Are you? Probably not
She sits there stroking her ponytail, tucking wisps of flyways into her long mass of hair. Not pretty but not ugly, she's the kind of person who never requires a second look over, nor wants one. A glance around the room reveals girls. Girls who are beautiful, skinny, with jewelry shining on their wrists, who toss their heads gaily and smile, their teeth brighter than the silver at their necks and fingers. Kilts swish around their thighs, their "model-esque" bodies lithe and willowy, the kind that look like they could break. Yet the casual shake of their hips as they walk and their arms, thin as twigs, yet impregnable as trees, swinging at their sides, attest to a rare breed of confidence that exudes from their every gesture.
Yet she sits there alone, the wall of a book shrouding her from their aura, almost suffocating to the mere human. Words conceal her eyes as they focus on the text. Lines on the page are unaffected by the glorious atmosphere, as the pantheon of earthbound goddesses stride by her desk. Their giggles are unashamedly innocent, but it is hard for her not to fidget as she sits alone - the one human, struggling with her identity while a divine procession blows past her on the wings of their own self assurance.
Have you ever felt alone? Yes.
When? When don't I?
Why do you think people allow others to feel like that? You're human too. You tell me.
Loneliness is the kind of sensation that eats at your heart until you walk around feeling like there is nothing left. A shell, a soulless shell, you feel as your eyes hollow and you stare at ghosts. Specters stand where the people you loved, when you had a heart, stood. New people, the same faces, pose and laugh and glitter, and sure you smile, but you only smile if you have a reason too. Your soul is fading fast, and soon the tide will pull you out of your life until you are only a small boat, afloat with terror.
As the ghosts fade into the gray mist of the world, they raise an illuminated wrist glittering in a sun they have created. Your former heart would have waved back at them, an apparition of jewelry on your own wrist clinking. But as you stare into eyes that you can no longer meet without a shield of dishonesty, your former self cowers - frightened of the changes it has made. It sinks to your feet, making them too heavy to run - to fly away from here.
Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream...
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:- Do I wake or sleep?*
She wakes up in the morning, the graying sky a blessed reminder of the night to come in only a matter of hours. Her day will go the same. She will sit there, laugh at what she should find funny, covet what she should covet and audibly wish for her exoteric dreams as she throws a discarded penny into a dried up wishing well. The melodic pulse of silver clanking on silver will be her own pulse today, as she is devoid of any other. Watching the flashes and sparkles of gemstones and minerals allow her to feel whole again, like one of the pack. How sad that she leans on the riches of others to fill her empty heart, eaten away by day after day of being the only one.
Yet she knows this is how life is supposed to be for her. She's tried other ways, yet as she dabbled in the arts of the comb and the earring, she found it easier, more livable, to stand and feel her back against the safety of the wall and admire. She can close her eyes; feel her fingers melt into the plaster against her body. That would be beautiful, she knows, to just become the watcher. Beautiful. She silently says a prayer for the rare beauty left in her world.
She's suddenly beautiful
We all want something beautiful
Man I wish I was beautiful
I will paint my picture
Paint myself in blue and red and black and gray
All of the beautiful colors**
Her fingers fly along, over and between the lines, guided by the pen clenched in her fingers. Mysteriously, words appear on the notebook's pages. "This is the effigy of the lonely," she writes, "the sad shadows that cast themselves around in my mind. I am a shadow, the turbulent route of my mind a sweeping hollow of dreams unknown to others. My every whisper and every sparkle, panoptic to the naked eye, only serve as an epitaph to true happiness. Only through this pen can I manipulate an honest smile of acceptance."
She leans over to switch off the radio, and climbs into bed. And before she plunges into the lone and lovely gray-black of the evening, her heart rattles in her chest, a final farewell to the life it never fully lived.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts I once had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than you should remember and be sad. ***
* Excerpt: Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
** Excerpt: Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows
*** Excerpt: Remember by Christina Rossetti