All you can do is follow the same steps you must make, but vacantly. There's no feeling of meaning, of purpose, of the air moving through your lungs, no sense of smell, no notice of anything going on around you. You've checked out. Everything was so interwoven into them, that they took you with them when they vanished. Now you're just a corpse repeating the same patterns that once held meaning for you, feeling nothing.
And then someone is trying to wake you up. They're yelling at you. You look up from whatever mindlessness you were sunken into at the moment, and see genuine feeling in a face you love with all your heart. Suddenly you feel your heart as well, hurting from the unmistakable pain and torment anguishing this face. This person is the only reason you've even been thinking, while being hollow. To protect them. To not hurt them. But you've failed. You promise them that you'll do better, and they let out a bark of hysteric laughter. They point out to you that you couldn't try any harder, and to see you do so even more is going to kill them.
Suddenly you have a reason to live.
You arrange a movie date with a girlfriend, a Chatty Katty who won't even notice your void expression or lack of response. You find yourself easily caught up and lost in her drama-filled hormonal teenage stories, that it's nice.
You get to the Cinema, and sit down for two hours of blood and gore, and most of the world's population turning into zombies. The movie begins romantically, and you dive for the doors. By the time you get back with a bucket of popcorn, nearly every character in the movie is now the walking dead. As you sit there, watching the animated corpses, you start relating to them.
Reality hits you like a ton of bricks.
You've been a fucking zombie for the last... however long it had been since they... don't want to think of them. Anyways, you can't believe your own stupidity at being so sure you had been fooling everyone. The movie ends, and you and your friend head to grab a bite of food. You're so lost in your thoughts that you didn't notice she had been babbling to you until she wasn't anymore. You look up, alarmed at the thought of offending her. She's looking straight forward, eyes focused on the burger place at the end of the block, jaw set tight, and walking with a brisker pace suddenly. Her eyes glance quickly to the side, your glance follows.
Four men stand outside a bar, smoking their cigarettes and being drunkenly obnoxious. Obviously your friend feels they are dangerous, but you still don't FEEL very much... let alone danger; hadn't you already experienced the worst thing that could ever happen to you? But these men brought back a strong feeling of deja vu... one of those painful memories you tended to avoid was brought to the surface. Of four different men in a dark alley, of being cornered, and suddenly saved by...
You stop in your tracks and take a step towards the men. As adrenaline pumps through your veins, "Stop. Turn around NOW." growls a very loud and distinct, painfully familiar silky voice. As you keep approaching the men, the voice keeps telling you to stop, go back to your friend, be safe... suddenly your illusion is broken off.
"Hello, Beautiful! Can we help you?" one of the bar men ask. You notice that these are definitely different men from your memory. Your friend is having a panic attack behind you, while you walk towards the bar.
"No, no. Sorry... thought you looked like someone I know, apparently I was wrong." you say, and turn around to hurry back to your friend.
"Are you INSANE?? Do you have a death wish??" your friend whispers to you, as you both finish walking to the burger joint.
Offended, you stop and say, "No. I don't have a death wish." As your friends expression of shock sinks in, you realize that it had been a rhetorical question... you had taken her too seriously. Wow. Oops. Well then...
After eating quickly in silence, your ride home is quite the opposite. She blares the music too loud for conversation, and sings along while driving ten miles over the speed limit. When you get back to your house, you are very sure that she's probably never going to talk to you again...
The next day you pick up two free rundown motorcycles off the side of the road, and take them to the only real friend you've got left. As soon as you pull up in his driveway, his brilliant smile and radiant personality can't help but warm you a little as well. The pursuant weeks are spent in his company, being happy and almost back to normal whenever you're with him. When you're not with him, it's easier to cope with life a bit, because you can look forward to his sunshine brightening your barren and shabby insides soon again.
But unexpectedly he leaves you, too.
You dive into a worse pain than before, because now you can't crawl back into your shell of numbness. When you originally broke out of it, it shattered and you can't rebuild it again. Now you have to deal with the pain, and the agony is torture.
You finally go to see him, and he shatters your hope entirely. But in the dark of night, he's at your window. He gives you a trail of midnight riddles to figure out in your half-asleep mind, then slips away once again. Upon awaking, you're not sure if his appearance at your window had been a dream or not, but it led you to the answer.
Another dark creature of Folklore.
It can't be. But it's the only answer...
After having read the Twilight saga, by Stephenie Meyer, through several times, I still get completely sucked into Bella when I peruse these pages. This is my rendition of chapters 1-12 of "New Moon" by Stephenie Meyer, the second book in the series. That's as far as I am into reading it for my fifth time through, at the moment.These books are very different from the classic ideas of mythical creatures. But don't let those differences stop you from picking the book up. Don't let the age-old Christian objections keep you from reading this amazing book series. Just because these books cast a different light on creatures we're so familiar with, doesn't diminish the fantastic romance and love story that ensues. The impossibilities that are overcome, and the beauty of it all.
May you have a beautiful day, full of magic and myth.
Until Next Time...
~Tanya~
