| Beautiful pain...how it coursed down her face in rivulets of sorrow permanently etched upon her soul. Could anyone know this angst and not shed the self same tears...she did not know nor did she care...she knew only the pain, deep and abiding feeling as if it had always been thus she did not remember a time without it. A hollow loneliness seemed to echo throughout her so that she curled protectively around herself though to those in her company she seemed to stand upright and assured. Such fallacy this faux assurance, she wore it like a mantle a disguise when reality was an interior landscape so bleak as to take the strongest to their knees in a despair of unrelieved pain and desolation. She knew the intensity of her interior landscape was taking its toll and that the veneer of her surface was beginning to crack like a glaze done in crackle finish, crazed and lined so that tiny bits of her sorrow spilled through. Sweet sorrow...the only comfort she had ever known she pulled it warm and familiar close around her, its gilded bars of hopeless disregard an agonizing embrace of her beautiful pain. Le belle douleur...in the eloquence of the French...the beautiful pain, how it called to her. This...her anguish her soul a painting done in the colors of despair and desolation, a watercolor wash across the canvas of life, reflected the dejection of her spirit, heart shattered upon the cliffs of betrayal, love unworthy, lost on the universal path of time. |
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| Careful dignity draped her thoughts, the veneer a necessity against the encroaching malady. This strength of will, heroic in its porportions guided her through long corridors of despair so dark and fell that to emerge upon the other side was an accomplishment few would have survived. Yet survive she did. Long and convoluted eons did she until without realizing it she became a physical embodiment, a being separate from mankind, an elemental of a new category; pain brought to life in all its terrible beauty. It was long before realization of her heretofore-unknown condition came into the focus of her tortured consciousness and when it did oddly enough, it brought her some measure of relief. Not bright gaiety and joy mind you but a lessening of the pressure to keep the pain shrouded under the veneer of polite civilization. No longer, she realized, was she bound by the decorum of man, for she herself was not human anymore but other, an elemental of sorrow, despair with intelligence. The raiment of her pain she wore with such beauty it drew others to her, moths to flame and from this flame were born the poets and artists, writers and musicians great thinkers of sensitivity who had been embraced by her anguish. They knew her as Belle Douleur, and they loved her obsessively guarding her with a jealousy fierce and undeniable. To look upon her was to feel sorrow, to embrace her heroic; to love her was to become one of the few shinning with the light of her despair. Belle Douleur. � Linda H. Lawrence |
| Le Belle Douleur (The Beautiful Pain) |
| The Paper Dragon |
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