And hadn’t she wanted this clarity? This change? Perhaps not such a savage change, a hideous unbearable change.
It was a hideous, glorious thing, to be uprooted like a tree after a storm and held up to the brisk blue sky, naked and lost.
As she laid in her bed, rain fell softly like little pin drops on the roof. A great and terrible pain swelled in her chest, as if her heart had fallen out, as if she were halfway between being born and being dead.
From the first, this autumn had seemed different. Life had seemed different. That it happened to take place in a strange and linear timeline before her 26th birthday was struck her. She wondered, too, presumed she must have felt this way as a newborn baby. Red and cold, the warmth of the womb taken suddenly away, and the world so fresh and raw to her.
Everything felt exaggerated with this pain. Certain mundane things that had once seemed the bane of her existence (the hiss of her neighbor’s radio, the stack of reading on her desk) now seemed foreign.
She felt harvested. Brandished. A sheaf of wheat lifted and broken the from the soil. She would look at something (her keys on the corner table, her dog on his bed) and see them completely, so sharply, as if a veil had been lifted.
As if sympathetic to her heartbreak and humiliation, the world never stopped raining. Gifts of sympathy from nature were showered upon her as if to say, “look, everything destroyed is created again”.
She had lived through the last two years in a shroud. Sleepwalking. Perhaps she had purposely done this (although he had helped), and perhaps had she been wiser, she might have known better.
It was the lie. Together they had developed a fictional construct, a pretend world. When she looked upon it now, it seemed equal a set on a stage, and a barren land, a battleground replete with blood.
Patricia Ann McNair 
There were better times. She knew that now.
And hadn’t she wanted this clarity? This change? Perhaps not such a savage change, a hideous unbearable change.
It was a hideous, glorious thing, to be uprooted like a tree after a storm and held up to the brisk blue sky, naked and lost.
As she laid in her bed, rain fell softly like little pin drops on the roof. A great and terrible pain swelled in her chest, as if her heart had fallen out, as if she were halfway between being born and being dead.
From the first, this autumn had seemed different. Life had seemed different. That it happened to take place in a strange and linear timeline before her 26th birthday was struck her. She wondered, too, presumed she must have felt this way as a newborn baby. Red and cold, the warmth of the womb taken suddenly away, and the world so fresh and raw to her.
Everything felt exaggerated with this pain. Certain mundane things that had once seemed the bane of her existence (the hiss of her neighbor’s radio, the stack of reading on her desk) now seemed foreign.
She felt harvested. Brandished. A sheaf of wheat lifted and broken the from the soil. She would look at something (her keys on the corner table, her dog on his bed) and see them completely, so sharply, as if a veil had been lifted.
As if sympathetic to her heartbreak and humiliation, the world never stopped raining. Gifts of sympathy from nature were showered upon her as if to say, “look, everything destroyed is created again”.
She had lived through the last two years in a shroud. Sleepwalking. Perhaps she had purposely done this (although he had helped), and perhaps had she been wiser, she might have known better.
It was the lie. Together they had developed a fictional construct, a pretend world. When she looked upon it now, it seemed equal a set on a stage, and a barren land, a battleground replete with blood.
Abby, thanks so much for sharing this. Haunting. Hope to see you sometime soon. xo