so I called him stupid.
I told him vampires drink blood and it’s not in the least bit attractive much less sexy. Nothing about that haunting iron-infested liquid is appealing and just because it mirrors red wine doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s only good because they need it to be.
Vampires burst into ash in the sunlight because that’s what they are. Nothing more but walking corpses who yearn for life and that’s all that blood is: Life. They want humans because humans are walking alive and so why should humans want vampires? Mortality may be limiting and it may be fraught with frailty, but so many humans are already living as if they’re immortal so there isn’t a real need for vampires.
They feed into fetishes and back-alley seductions. If you’re okay with vampires then you should be okay with cannibalism and to date that’s about as taboo as you’ll get in most modern societies. Vampires aren’t creatures we should hold in esteem because blood-lust is craziness that already exists in small doses: murderers and killers and sociopaths are addicted to seeing life disappear from their victims. Vampires are the same. If you have any value for the gift that is life then loving a vampire is the same as saying who needs such a gift when I can simply take it?
Never call me Bella, I proclaimed. I won’t love like her.
*disclaimer*
Please remember that this is a work of fiction.
Grow.
Grow into your own definition of beauty… Grow to re-define it and make it yours. Be as bold as you wish to be, as tender as you need to be, as elegant as you want to be….grow to be a beauty in your own right.
Grow to question, to ask them, to answer them… Grow to reaffirm whatever faith you choose and grow to understand acceptance but never underestimate the changes that come with experience.
Grow to feel empathy over sympathy because no one wants to be pitied… that’s even lower than poverty. Grow to always put your feet in another’s shoes so that you can feel the heaviness of their burdens because in this way you’ll never pull the trigger until you’re sure you can live with their weight in your hands.
Grow into forgiving because bitterness is a venomous poison. Once it enters your body it eats away from the inside, burning a raging storm until you’re nothing but dust at the end. Don’t throw away your life to revenge but grow to FORGET. Forgiveness doesn’t mean much if you can’t let go of transgressions so grow to allow pain its chance to dissipate.
Wondrous child if there’s anything in this life that will ever have a chance at destroying your sense of self then it is the incapability to allow yourself to grow after the mistakes and regrets you’ll inevitably make.
Some mistakes are minor in their impact, others are more significant and you will have to grow to discern which is which. Your reflection on these actions will mold you in ways that’ll transform your life, but this will only happen if you choose to grow from it.
The world will tell you how to do many things but the choice to do these things is solely yours.
Some will force your obedience, those who don’t deserve your innate sense of trust must be fought.
dear child… grow to fight for the beliefs you have, for the cause you hold to be right and the people you love.
grow to understand that the choices people make aren’t yours to judge so live your life, don’t wait till the end of school or the “beginning” of adult hood because by the time that happens you’ll find that time has slipped between your buttered hands and you’ve already lived… a life that you never meant to live.
Sincerely yours.
They say a girl who likes gold jewelry is a girl who’ll do anything. She’ll ride whatever you have, she’ll take whatever you give and then some.
They say a girl who likes silver jewelry is a girl who’s too cold and too cool to do anything anyone says until you get her alone and those walls come tumbling down.
They say a lot of things about a lot of people who like and dislike this or that.
What they don’t say is how a person goes from being absolutely nothing to absolutely something.
Argue what you want. We’re all somethings to begin with, we just feel like we’re nothing from time to time, but don’t lie to yourself.
If you can remember when you were something, what made you nothing? If nothing is the result of endless bullying, abuse… physical and emotional, negligence, suffering then why do those who have everything believe that they’re nothing also?
They keep their snickering up on a daily basis, they have to look down on you to believe that they’re worth something…. they’re probably feeling the same kind of nothing you are and if they’re not feeling it while you’re feeling it then it’s guarantee that they’ll feel it in the future.
Their ultimate downfall will happen when life’s in order for you and you will be the they you once hated only you will justify yourself saying they hurt you, they brought you down therefore there’s no reason for you to feel any kind of compassion for them.
Wrong.
It’s that kind of thinking that says a girl who likes gold jewelry is gonna bend over backwards for any guy who walks by. It’s that kind of thinking that says a man isn’t a man unless he’s had more than one girl writhing beneath him. It’s that kind of thinking that says losers are losers no matter what the do and the winners are winners even if deep down all the money, hoes and fame the world can offer barely grazes the void in their souls.
So, I’m gonna break it down like this.
All these half assed, heart stretched, brain broken people end up here. In this place. These walls have probably seen and heard it all. This bar has had more people drink and cry on it than any pillow on any bed in any room.
Maybe it’s the dark subdued hues of creamy grays and maroon reds, maybe it’s the dim quiet, the lull of tunes mixed together in ways that become indecipherable.
Maybe the Black Jewel was the only place where you could like whatever you wanted. Be whatever you cared to be because the only judge you’re up against is yourself.
There are 12 months in a year. 52 weeks. 365 days. 7 days per week. The work week starts on Monday; the weekend usually starts on a Friday night. Saturdays can be utterly dull and awkwardly silent while Sunday’s are just a reminder that Monday would be rounding the evening corner and everything that just passed will start over again. Monotonous, routine, and mundane.
There’s a variation of 30-31 days in a month with the exception of February. There are 24 hours in each day. Each hour is made up of 60 minutes and there are 3600 seconds in 60 minutes. These are simple common facts that every person should know. It’s all about the time. Time that we generally don’t make good use of because for the most part, if you’re a student you’re studying all the things that you don’t necessarily love and if you’re a working citizen, then God help you, because most of the time you’d rather be elsewhere than at your job. Unless you happen to be one of the lucky few who’ve managed to love what you have to do to pay the bills and put food on the table.
But this is how the world works. Regular citizens run on a 12-hour clock while the military and other government personnel run on a 24-hour clock. For average Joes the world only makes sense within their intimate circles. You don’t worry about the country across the ocean or the neighbor you’ve only ever glimpsed. What you worry about is how you can get yourself up in the morning so you can get to a place you call work so you can make money to pay for the debt you’ve accumulated since college.
There isn’t a chance to run away or hide or make a new life because even if you tried, the past has an odd way of coming back. It may bite you in the rear, it may punch you in your face, it may even… soothe you with a kiss, still, whatever it does, it comes back. It always does. When it does… it’s as if time’s rearranged itself… just a little so you taste the emotions that you placed safely away, digging themselves out of the cold box that was your heart and twisting the knife in your soul ever so lightly till the smile on your face is a grimace and water consumes your eyes.
Time is worth regretting. Not love. Not happiness or sadness or confusion or the frustration that comes from not understanding why people aren’t…’nice’ is worth regretting. Not ever saying you loved someone isn’t worth regretting. What is worth regretting is the fraction of a second, in that blessed hour of that God given day when you could’ve bargained away your life to have just those precious moments back… that’s worth regretting. When you could’ve given the time but didn’t, when you could’ve valued the minutes but didn’t, when the days blurred into one and you forgot how special that one day meant… that’s worthy of regret.
It isn’t easy believing. Yet some people believe anyways. The essence of time is what you do with it. The meaning of life, unlike all those cliché little lines that’s been floating around even before you born, can’t even measure it right. It’s about what you do, did, doing… that’s what’ll matter.
In the end, that’s all that’s mattered.
***
Song Cara used to read like nobody’s business. She used to pull out the big Webster dictionary her parents had in the bookshelves and copy down words she deemed important and then she’d plaster those words on her bedroom wall. Other kids probably had magazine photos, band posters and other kinds of paraphernalia but the cream colored walls in her rooms were stained with the words that she wrote in fine print, calligraphy and sometimes when she was feeling up to it they were intricate collages full of color, vibrant and begging to be understood, yearning in their unknown myriad way for touch.
She liked words. They meant more to her. People always said that you should pay attention to how someone acts because it’s the subtlety in their body language that really lets you know if you can trust them, but for Cara, all she wanted were the words. Maybe it was shallow or naïve of her to want the things that anyone could so easily say, but she loved them anyways. For awhile…
This day, however, was almost at its end. The sun was setting leaving behind streaks of orange against a periwinkle blue canvas. It was oddly peculiar. Sad… almost. Pale pink and violet came out to dance with the remaining sunshine, but the wind still blew scattering the clouds, brushing against leaves on the verge of coloring. It whispered against the bare legs of girls who dared to wear skirts and it teased the tame and slicked back hair of business men into rebellion.
On this particular afternoon however, in this particularly busy city, on this used sidewalk, Cara was 16. It was her birthday, a mellow day in August, too hot to be autumn but a bit too cold to still be summer. It was time for her to leave the library where she worked at; it was time for her to go home. Clutched to her chest were a series of notebooks, yellowed pencils stuck out from the messy bun she had twirled her hair into and the black rimmed glasses around her eyes had a knack for consistently dipping further down the thin bridge of her nose. The small rubber heels she wore clacked rhythmically meeting the cemented gravel with purpose, but her gray-brown eyes shifted uncomfortably. She looked straight ahead of her, the bus stop was only a few more feet away and all she had to do was make it there in one piece. The one piece was the difficult part.
Cara wasn’t known for her grace, she was known for her ability to magically trip even when there was nothing for her to trip over. And granted, she never made smooth first impressions and with only a few more life saving steps to take, Cara did what she does best. The small, almost non-existent heel, caught in a crack and she fell forward. The gasp whooshed out of her lips as her arms fell forward, hands trying to break the fall, her books clattered when her arms released them and the pencils came falling along with miles of chocolate brown hair.
This is the part where you’re likely to expect prince charming, laughing a sexy chuckle, smiling a sexy smile, but no, not for Cara. The fall wasn’t pleasant, they never are, and in those teeny moments when gravity pulled her down for its humiliating kiss, the bus driver honked his horn and drove right on by without braking. Cara’s glasses hit the cement cracking one of the lens and because the world is full of cruel people, no one helped her.
“Ow…” Cara winced, her left butt cheek hurt and her left arm had taken the brunt force of the fall. It was scraped and slightly bloody and so was the palm of her right hand . She pulled herself together as much as a 16 year old teenage girl could do, “heh,” she said sheepishly looking around absently, “nothing wrong here,” but there was no one to care. Her eyes scanned the area, but people walked briskly by without a second glance and those in the outside café’s kept their conversations going, their laughter… ringing.
Smiling, sheepishly, timidly almost, she looked for her books which thankfully weren’t fluttering everywhere. She gathered them neatly and gave up on the pencils which had somehow rolled out onto the road and were currently getting run over. “Thank God you’re not one of those pencils Song Cara,” she muttered to herself. By the time she had gathered her things, there was no choice but to walk the whole way to the little apartment she called home.
Night was barely up. It was hardly evening. Cara walked as briskly and as quickly as she could all the while hoping and wishing that she wouldn’t trip anymore. Neighborhood dogs were barking, the sound of engines turning off and turning on drowned the chirping of mama birds and papa birds calling out to their young. Care wished she hadn’t stayed at the library so late. People often wondered what librarians did, well, truth be told, not much really. They really only got to play with book and for Cara that was about the best job in the world. She was only trip-prone feet away from her apartment door and that’s when she saw him.
His lip appeared split, blood seemed caked to the side of his chin. His dark hair covered his eyes and his shirtfront was covered in a forebodingly dark vermillion red. Cara held tight to her books and walked closer, each step pounded alongside her heart beat. “Oh god, please don’t be dead…” she thought to herself, biting her lip and leaning over him, but when she noticed how he clutched his side, the books were out of her hands and her hands were on him.
His eyes were closed, but he was breathing heavily. Air came in and out in sharp, heavy, pangs and although Cara had been taught to stay away from strangers, she had also been taught to care. She couldn’t make out all his features because yes, she was still kind of sort of blind without the full use of her glasses, but she knew he was handsome. Her palm went to his forehead, “Good, no fever,” she came to one swift decision. At 16, she was going to save a life. His life.
I could definitely use an editor.
On the pale off cream walls, hiding miniature cracks and breaks in paint were thousands of taped photos, posters and anything that could remind her of the outside world. There were clippings of every fathomable place on Earth. The sky in all its glorious shades peeked from behind beer advertisements and pretty girls wearing pretty little lace things. As sunshine streamed in through the windows, as she parted the curtains, she watched the dust float in mid-air and collide with the pictures on the walls. For a second, no, a continuous stream of moments, she wondered why they were so beautiful. Pictures worthy of thousands of words were easy because they could be any word. They could be anything and could be deciphered without hesitation and yet all that could come to mind was a numbing blankness. Years of taping, cutting, and poster hunting…the pictures were only worth the time she put in them and that wasn’t much.
Somewhere in her room, though, was a small wooden book shelf which held the books she had mindlessly collected over the years. There weren’t many, but she called them her collection anyways. Their pages had yellowed some, but if you opened them they still smelled new, the inked words so brilliantly black you couldn’t tell how old they were until you checked the publication dates.
In these pages, along the margins were the thoughts and dreams and perceptions of a girl who knew what it was like see more than photos and pictures. The scribbled print and off-cursive were the wishes and hopes that floated in the images on the wall, but they were born there. There. Right there in the pages of the books that took her to all the excruciatingly wondrous places she loved so much; she hunted for their faces so they could be hung on her walls.
