Finished Cessation!

Cessation:
“Write about what you know, what you are.”
Her smile flickers, and her eyes go still, their swift butterfly motions settling into a freeze frame. She turns towards the clock, in the hopes that its arms will show her a favorable time, but the clock is displeased with her today, and rotates its limbs languidly, like a dancer in slow motion. All about her, the scritching of pens fill the room until she feels as though she will choke upon the sound, upon the knowledge that others are alive and know themselves. But then, she thinks, she has no bitterness to complain of- she knows herself as well as anyone is capable of knowing a soul. She knows the dankest corners of her heart, where mold and jealousy gnaw upon the pulsing walls, seeking to obliterate what is already tenuously taped together. She knows the vivid life of joy, the vibrancy of being in the presence of one best beloved, the exultance in knowing the better part of yourself with an intimacy that transcends conversation and anything else that mankind has knowledge of. But most of all, the pinnacle of her knowledge, she knows the meaning of the word cessation.
She knows that if others look it up in the dictionary, it will say something about stopping, and there it will end. (Another cessation, she thinks, and smiles, brief as summer lightning. The faintest pang touches some innate core of her; though she has erased everything that is under her conscious control, still she remembers when the smiles were real.) She knows best of all, what the dictionary says about cessation; she has gone to look it up before, and would not be surprised if the page were marked with her fingerprints, dirty and tainted from the years when she knew nothing. (How arrogant she is now, she muses dreamily, with a smile as delicate as a soap bubble, but does not have the nerve to laugh out loud; it is something that she has never done.) But now, ages past the first time that her hands tremblingly flicked upon the waterfilm-thin pages of the book, she knows perhaps best of all that cessation is not always a conclusion.
She has felt the cessation of a heartbeat, the gradual, agonizing death of the only three that she has sworn to herself she will ever love. She is at what others might call a cynical age- but then, she lives in the century, not of some metal, but of a metal formed in the mind; the shield of cynicism and mindless hatred. She, like many others, is under the delusion that she understands something about the universe now, and perhaps she does. She knows that to every ending, there is another beginning. It is the monotonous cycle that will never be permitted to end, and in some sense, in some desperate corner of her mind, she loathes it. Once, just once, she prays, to a god that she does not truly believe exists, let hearts stop beating, and stay stopped. Why must the endless cycle continue? What good does it do to get up and pretend to be real?
Her dreams have led her to an end, and she gazes at the deadened, insurmountable wall in something akin to blank despair. But as the bell rings, and she rises automatically, she knows that this is less of a conclusion than a mere impasse.
---
It is raining when she exits the school, a gray drizzle that threatens to drown the day in bland monochrome. She stands patiently, waiting for the car to come, eyes as blank as the black shirt she is wearing now, as blank as the tentative cloud-whorls in the skies. She can feel the back of her neck prickle with the stares of others as her shirt begins to cling to her skin, tightly, like a little child on her first day in school. But she cannot bear to stand with them, to feel the insatiability of their desire for life, their energy, their angers and joys and futile hopes that she longs to share, but does not.
She cannot bear to think of another cessation, one whose beginning is encroaching upon the precious little time that she has to spend in this emotionless nirvana. She will not think upon the cessation of each day, when she slips quickly, easily into a slumber that she wishes could last forever. That will come later, and she refuses to think of anything except what is put before her in these times.
Besides, she rather likes the rain. It does not go past her without a sound, it does not look through her, towards another face, smiling with a tender trust that she wishes with all that remains of her duct-taped heart were her own. It reminds her, more than anyone and anything can, that she is real and part of this universe, that it is not her fault that she cannot be seen, that the cessation of her existence is not of her choice, and so she cannot be blamed for it. It reminds her that she is subject to all the laws of this realm, that her cards are the same as all others in this poker game, and someday, when the stakes are high enough, and the cards are ripe, she will lay them down and win the game.
At least, this is what she tells herself whenever she rises from her bed, to do two of the three things that continue to qualify her as a living being. (The third one does not yet appeal to her, as it requires a person other than herself alone, and she has never truly thought upon doing anything that did not depend foremost upon herself.) But soon, she knows, the termination of that dream will dawn, Death’s scythe will collect another wispy soul from her thoughts, and she will be left alone, to stare at an insuperable wall until the day that another dream arises, and she is temporarily relieved of her lonely sentinel duty.
The world drones onward in a high, buzzing beep that screams in need for her attention, and she realizes that her ride has come. A gradual, slow walk sees her in the car, dripping over the leather seats as her eyes fix upon the windshield wipers, constantly erasing the tears from her features, as though willing them never to exist. Willing them, like they are something that she can simply cast away..
---
Dinner is a silent affair, laden with the sting of pepper and salt and unvoiced accusations. She watches her rice as though suspecting it of a conspiracy against her, but makes no sound. She will not grant them the satisfaction of a noise that admits her discomfort today- she will not please them with the evidence of a tear. Those who enter her mind, who know her as she confesses the torturous vigil of the day to them, might think her strong, to hold back such a barrage, a myriad of emotions, but she knows differently.
She knows that this false strength is something that she can draw upon only for a little while, that it will cost her, and that with every moment she breathes in this falsified peace, she loses something. She knows that once, this would have mattered, this losing, that it would have flayed her to the quick and she would have grown angry. But now she lies still, a blank stare fixed upon her rice, until an authoritative voice breaks the silence and tells her that she can go now.
Reminiscing, she remembers that once, perhaps she might have been angry that they thought themselves capable of exerting their authority upon her. Once, she had considered herself a being apart from the universe, untouched by its laws, graced by the attentions of deities beyond mortal comprehension.
Once, she had been a child- and then the years had passed.
She rises quietly, tilting her head upwards with dull intent, before turning towards the door. The room is inflicted with a burst of silence as she closes the door- nothing about her creates a conflict, because it is the way that she has become under the pressure of threats and disappointed tears. She wishes, often, that she were not so easily stirred by emotion, and so empty at the same time.
The worst of both worlds, she might think, but she does not think often now. It hurts like the dull thud of a knife to recall what she is, and what she might have been.
---
She is standing in the middle of the room now, black shirt dry, gaze as wide and unfocused as a field of stars in the heavens. (Her shirt she refused to relinquish to another’s hold- it is a pillar of familiarity in a situation that surrounds her with its strangeness.) Her eyes are wide and dark, and lodged within them is only the faintest grasp of the concept of fear, of submission. She has immersed herself too much in that submission to remember that there is anything beyond it, that there is anything that she can do besides tilt her head in acquiescence.
Her room is something of a sanctuary as she enters it- untorn by the wars that rage beneath, the angry tears that are tossed in a whirling tempest that seems to belong to another world altogether. But even that peace possesses the seeds of its destruction, and its cessation comes in the form of a single lily-white paper that lies placidly upon her wooden desk. Nothing is inscribed upon it, and it is that which catches her at last, entrapping her. Wordless papers are a rarity in the world within which she dwells, the world where music resonates within her mind, with all the angelic quality of angels. But there is a special meaning to this paper.. one that is brought to her mind with a lightning start as her carelessly-slung backpack tumbles to the floor.
She is not prone to violence, though it is difficult to remember that about herself when some faces greet her vision, Nevertheless, it is difficult to recall that she needs that useless paper, that unfilled page that all but begs to be drowned in a flood of ink and tears, each word as difficult to put down as a drop of blood, carefully milked from her sunbrowned flesh.
She loathes that page with all the passion that can be reserved for something so simplistic, but can express none of it. She is forbidden, by the orders of her blood and bound by the restraints that are part of her nature, and would loathe them, but cannot, because they are all that she has left of herself. Time has eroded all the things that once made her unique, and have worn her from a poised, delicate statue into another rock, smoothed by the tide that pulls her into its loving embrace. She is no longer anything other than a doll manipulated for the pleasure of another’s thoughts, another’s dreams- and the others are content to have it so. And because they no longer stab her with their demands, she, too, is relieved.
Her eyes quietly contemplative, she folds her hands together, chin thrusting outward as she stares blankly at the nearby wall. Then, smiling with only the faintest trace of amusement, she unfolds her hands, picks up her favorite quill, and begins to write.
[end]