Awakening Sunset

AWAKING SUNSET

She knelt and whispered, clutching her soul to her side, for it had escaped her somehow (through some uncanny manner, unknown). Yet she clenched it hard, in failing fingertips; though her grip would never falter, she knew better than to let go, you see.

There was a tale to tell, or perhaps several, but she didn’t know if the waves would listen, really listen, and talk back to her. Answers were what she was looking for, and she held her soul out to that great expanse of blue and grey hues, as if offering a chalice. She hoped it would accept, and grant her the freedom she wished. For this was the way she had always wanted to go, in a state of contented melancholy, palms turned upwards, giving of herself to something stronger than she.

Strength was not something she lacked, but something that had not occurred to her to claim as her own. Her strength was always something she attributed to other people, naming them as the cause that propelled her through life.

She didn’t know what it meant to be whole anymore. She had lost a little of herself with each new experience that tainted her, and though she realised that the parts they were replaced with moulded her, she did not care much for the person she had become in those seven years.

Her thoughts were interrupted as the blinkered sunset bent behind the horizon, leaving a trace streak of orange burning like a lone candle across the dusky sky. She thought of the moon, that glistened brightly as it dawned above her head, and the stars she had told only one person that she yearned for. Oh, how she yearned for those stars, to stretch their light far enough to cast hope into her eyes, or carry her away with them. Stars are what dreams are made of, or at least, her dreams. Their twinkling lights told her of lost cities and other worlds, of forgotten loves, and answers to the bleak questions she fired at them whenever they came out to play. Nothing caught her imagination quite like those stars.

In the hazy darkness rolling above her, she saw clouds hovering, as if waiting for her to continue her story. To her, they were a warning beacon; soon, there would be no light left, and only when her body washed up on the shore in several days, would her story have an ending. But, if she left the world in such a way, there would be no closure, and while it was life’s ambiguity that paved her path to brighter places she wasn’t sure it would suffice for those left behind.

For this time around, she knew she was sometimes wanted, sometimes needed, and this knowledge only increased the magnetic pull, the want, the need of the ending she so desperately sought.

Then the night had at last fallen, and her words trailed in semi-darkness across the paper, and the story, Her Truth, would never see the closure it desired.