Drowning In Bitterness - (7) The Silent Hearth
Part 7 of 7 - TOC
The Silent Hearth
She leaned back from the document. Here eyes burned. Too many hours of concentrating. She reread the scene from Kôr.
“Sand the color of bone… they weren’t the kind of people who used modern words… she felt it was deep…”
The words lay on the screen like dead insects. They weren’t just clumsy; they were lifeless. She’d spent years honing her tongue into a scalpel, and now that she needed a brush, all she had was a weapon that cut through the canvas every time she tried to paint it.
She’d deconstructed other people’s worlds for so long that her own imagination had withered into a dry, linguistic ash. She had no voice. She had only an imitation of a voice.
She’d hoped creating would feel like a cleansing, a new-found humility she could demonstrate, but it only felt like another pose. “Look at me, I’m honest about my own emptiness.” One more way to be seen. One more hungry chase for the next like.
She stared at the chat window with Vane. He hadn’t written anything else. He didn’t need to. He’d handed her the mirror, and what she saw in it wasn’t a writer in the making, but a ruin. With just one sentence, she was dismantled.
She placed her fingers on the keyboard again. She wanted to write about the flame in Kôr. She wanted Elissa to succeed.
“The spark leapt out and…”
No word felt true. Every adjective felt like a lie. And with an icy clarity she realized that the silence she’d feared from Vane wasn’t a punishment he’d inflicted on her. It was a condition she’d made for herself.
She struck the flint against the stone in her text again and again. But no spark came. Only the dry, rhythmic sound of keystrokes in an empty room.
The darkness in the apartment became total. The silence was total again. And now she realized she couldn’t stop it. She waited for a feeling of relief, a feeling of having chosen something real. But the page became judgment.
The relief never came. There was only her, and the bitter realization that the hearth wasn’t just cold. She had forgotten how to imagine a fire at all.