Immune to the plague of discourteous minds, she is ever stronger than assumed, dousing the fires of unwelcome desire even as the walls closed in around her with hands groping, pressing, clinging to her new form. Unawakened, but left to navigate a world with wide, hungry eyes that pried at her, she shrunk away from its attention, breathing in the sweetly stale air of eloquence poured from yellowing pages that paraded words before her as an endless stream of dusks; a continuous magic hour that bathed quiet moments in orange sherbet hues tasting as delicious as they made everything appear.
It was a divine retreat, to be swaddled in the warm down of story and soon she would counter mandatory anguish with her own fine needlepoint, each prick and jab she endured a fresh spun line of phrase that pulled together a web of tantalizing mystery. Alone to the world which sought to shake and jostle her into compliance, she privately rebuked her custodians, sitting long hours in presumed solitude even as she met the best companions she would ever know. New sisters, brothers, husbands, lovers, cherished family woven from ink that sprawled across horizons filled by her need to own any world and never be owned by this one.
The rush of obsession crowded her, the unkind grip of uninvited hands playing too close to bruised innocence, and she drew knees to chest and heavy breaths to escape. Ploddingly, the resolution came clear just as she’d demanded time and again for the fog to lift, her rage burning off the thick suffocation of better respected accounts. Yet the final recess was punishment, ostracism and a permanent scar worn across her damaged heart, drawn by the reckless passions of uncontrollable youth and never truly healed but for those moments when she sits, head cocked to one side and stills the noise of this world’s racing pulse for the steady beat of her own Eden, where life and death aren’t the providence of Gods or Nature, but her.
A word followed by countless others stacked atop one another to build, as if bricks, great constructions that strive to crack the Heavens and draw from them the hot blood of freedom. Glance down, revisit, re-enter, divine and again produce brick by brick, noun by noun, the twist of each delicate sentence a new beam to strengthen the blade of dominance with which to scrape away, carefully yet sparing no pain, the thick knot of jagged healing traversing her center.
She may never be free in this world, but this world was never the important one. This would is not her home.