(no subject)
This is a piece of writing that I wrote for English. Shaedy read it and gave me a look that could have melted ten thousand hearts, so consider yourself warned that this is Alison at her emo-est.
For the millionth time she gave up on trying to squash down the part of her she hated and opened her eyes. Her body was curled up, cat-like, in a corner in the green armchair. Her arms, wrapped tightly around her knees, drifted back to her sides. Her legs unbent, stretched, and she stood up. There was a sad grace about her. Her movements were slow and direct, precisely calculated, but almost reluctantly. Her eyes mirrored the sea, but they had been overcast and still for too many months.
She scanned the room she knew so well, half-lit by distorted light; the glass in the old window panes had crept downwards, summoned to the earth by gravity. The fig tree stood at one end, slightly dismembered but still large and proud. Having been rescued in its decrepit infancy from the local grocery store, it now looked nearly majestic. That was her favourite part of the room. The east-facing window framing the tree, above it the curved ceiling meeting the wall in an arch. The rest, in her mind, didn't really fit. The furniture was mis-matched and awkward, too out of date to be trendy and too modern to be antique. The carpet had once been Persian and full of reds and greens and blues and golds, but was now a thick, cream coloured, boring affair. Expensive but made of wool that shed, the rug attached itself to your socks. She had known the room for sixteen years, watched parts of it change, but still it retained the nature of its core, whatever that might be.
She didn't really like the room, but she thought perhaps she once did. A television used to sit on the floor, and she remembered being six years old and watching a tape of her sister's elementary school choir concert. The television had been moved to the basement, and then replaced with a newer, flashier version. The coffee table her dad had made in grade ten woodshop, and she used to push it out of the way, under the big window and beside the radiator. Music would play and she would dance, making it up as she went along, then refining and solidifying it. Often she would dance with her sister and they would create the motions together. Later she would practise for dance class, the same movement to the same song, over and over. She had started to feel stifled and maybe that was why she quit.
The giant painting of the tree of life had been moved to the dining room and replaced by two smaller ones. A photograph in black and white of the steps of Montmartre, and a scene of a west coast beach, full of driftwood, a wind-beaten fir tree in the background. They weren't exactly a match made in heaven, and they hung a little too far apart on the wall, but at a glance they pleased the eye. She had changed the room and she had thought it beautiful.
Now she plays the music of her youth, or the music of her parents' youth, because it's old enough to be popular again. She doesn't push the coffee table to the side because she isn't making up extravagant routines with her sister and she isn't practising for the stifling dance class. Sometimes she just sits ans listens, letting herself be taken along for the ride, but sometimes she gets up and dances. She dances because the music makes her happy, it gives her energy, it lets her scream along to the lyrics and it doesn't think she's crazy.
The song ends and she sits back down and cries. She doesn't know who she is or where she's going or even where she has gone. She longs for that person who existed when the fig tree was tiny but rapidly flourishing, when the carpet was colourful and acted as her stage, not her escape. She is tired of seeing dissappointment on the faces of the people she respects. She is tired of letting the endless line of mistake, resolve, mistake continue. She wants someone to shake her and tell her "Snap out of it! Here is the path now walk it, don't cry because you won't be alone." Her knees meet her chin and she tilts her head back against the green chair, stormy eyes shutting out the world and returning to their overcast state.
[end]
My english teacher said I could have left some of the stuff at the end out to let the reader make their own connections. I think he's right but at the time that I wrote it I had to get that stuff out of me and onto a page.