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Alan stands and waits for a train. Little does he know that this is to be the last day of his life. As the train arrives, his cholesterol ravaged heart finally gives up the struggle to pump life-sustaining blood through fat-soaked arteries. As Alan falls to the floor a significant enough shift in the air takes place that two hours later a freak tidal wave rises up on an Australian beach strewn with sun-seeking holiday-makers. Ignorant of the futility of their actions the tourists try to flee the towering oblivion. But one man sits alone in the melee; waiting for a fate that he sees is inevitable. Perhaps he is Poseidon awaiting the comfort of his watery kingdom and already dreaming of a transfigured Atlantis. It doesn’t matter to the struggling photographer who takes a photo of this freak occurrence through an uncaring telephoto lens that will make him a millionaire and provide the youth of a generation with a Tiananmen Square Kodak moment. This evening one such youth, a slender girl called Aurora, sits on her bed and looks at the poster and wonders what the man is thinking. Little does she know that the next day is to be the last of her life. If she had done then the course of the next day would have taken on a poeticism appreciated by all. However, she does not and though ignorance truly is bliss, in this case we can only smile forlornly at the tragedy that befalls anyone who lives in their dreams.
Aurora had her nose pressed up against the poster. She was trying, in vain, to look into the old man’s eyes, for in those eyes lay the answer to fathomless depths of questions: maybe even a meaning to this strange life. Yet the photo had obviously been taken from such a distance that any minor details were reduced. Ironically it was possible to see the fear and desperation in the eyes of those who panicked all around the serenity of that old man. He sat there enigmatically, carelessly free and that was why she supposed the picture had been so widely distributed. If he hadn’t been old and bearded she probably would have developed a teenager’s crush on him because even in that wasted body it was still possible to see the ghosted outlines of past attractiveness and she tried to imagine him as a twenty year-old, but her parents would never let her go out with a twenty year-old, so she imagined him as a seventeen year-old and he was very attractive. Yet his beauty wasn’t tangible; he didn’t have film-star looks nor an athlete’s body, he simply had eyes that dreamed wistfully. At least her vision had those eyes. After all how could anyone who *sees* and *feels* not look like the saddest man in the world. She had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
So, reluctantly, she slipped into a deep sleep, her movements suggesting a rapturous dream in which she was dancing with the sad man inside her head. In spirals and pirouettes she was breaking through the layers of melancholy that enveloped him and finding underneath a hopelessly shy smile that shed light on the darkest crevices of her heart. Slowly her eyes raised to his, but they were closed and his head was inclining, arcing and swooping downwards – slowly, gracefully – towards her lips, parting effortlessly and the lights screeched on and shattered her awake. Her mother. It was time for school. Aurora tried desperately to close her eyes and gather the fragments of the shattered dream back into that kiss, but she couldn’t. The vision was lost and a whole dream world had come to ruin in the morning apocalypse. Her heart ached. A low and quietly painful throb that shivered down her spine and tied her stomach in knots. She winced quietly and tried to repress the need to cry that welled up in her throat. But it was too late and she cried quietly, almost imperceptibly, to herself as she was accustomed to do when disasters struck in her life. How would she ever be happy if she couldn’t even find happiness in her dreams?
The school was a monolithic citadel, built in grey bricks and filled with grey people. In a vain effort to hide their insipidness they adorned themselves in the latest garish monstrosities from Nike and Adidas and basked in the collective sense of cool that can only be achieved through mass-marketing to the brain dead. It was a wonder that they did not all open their cans of Pepsi simultaneously and create a sudden carbon dioxide death-trap in the lunch hall. It also amazed her that so many incandescent colours could be rendered so grey when placed on such characterless zombies. Aurora didn’t hate her school. She hated the collection of people who shared it with her. They would toss Salinger to the bottom of their bags at the end of every English lesson and not give a damn about Holden. Daisy’s choice of the dragon over Gatsby, the knight in shining armour waiting pathetically in the bushes, went unnoticed. She hated them for never opening their minds to anything other than what the television told them was cool.
In this climate she wondered how he pulled it off. How he was both popular and sensitive at the same time and so beautiful. Allen. He had been the subject of her dream the last night, because his demeanour had so reminded her of the old man on the poster. He and Allen shared the same intangible beauty that made her knees barely capable of supporting her, that drove her to distraction if he even looked at her and that made her stare at the poster night after night and pray for happiness in her dreams, dreams of him. She liked to watch him and record his pretty ways in her diary, which resembled more a dossier on a murder suspect than a shell of empty thoughts. He was over 6ft tall and disliked people who smoked but on Tuesdays he would sit with the smokers regardless because on that day the younger children occupied his usual seat in the lunch hall, but she was sure that this didn’t mean he disliked young children, just those young children who had a tendency to fight pitched battles with the viscous custard that accompanied Tuesday’s apple pie. He had black hair, darker than her own, that only added to his enigmatic air. Because the only thing tat was tangible about him was that he was an enigma, she saw the way he smiled fakely at everyone who wanted to be his friend, letting them gain for a moment the satisfaction of acceptance even if he did not feel that way.
The love affair inside her head had started when he had smiled at her, but it had been pure and tainted with a shyness that sent waves of seismic euphoria through her heart and had caused her to clutch her books tightly to her breast as a pathetic substitute for his body. From then on he had been the only person in the entire school who transcended the greyness and burst into rainbow colour, an oasis in the barren desert of her life. Allen. And yet he hadn’t seemed to have noticed her ever again. The smile had become a cancer than spread through her body and made her sad by creating a yearning, burning need to see it again. And so she observed him from a distance, sadder than roses in winter.
Freak chance is the only thing we can depend on in life, as in the vacillating annals of time, the only certainty is randomness and the only hope for humanity is to embrace it. So perhaps it is not unfitting that random chance should have played such a large role in Allen’s life too. Who could have predicted the anomalous chain of events that would lead him to seeing Aurora’s captivating smile? It had been a winter’s Tuesday when he had first seen that girl, the one who had plunged him into a world of colour and exhilaration and breathless, desperate pining to see the same licker of a smile that had swept across her face when they had passed each other. The previous evening a freak explosion had taken place at a fireworks factory, but due to a peculiar insurance arrangement it had been necessary to create a scapegoat, one unfortunate man who found himself sacked and then sued for negligence by the insurance company, upon arriving home his wife, having heard the news, finally decided to present him with the divorce papers she had been hiding for two months. Dealt such a terrible blow by Chance the man sought the oblivion of alcohol, and when his son chanced into the living room, having forgotten his schoolbag his father beat him mercilessly in a drunken attempt at catharsis. This boy took out the pent up aggression he now felt for his father on two boys that victimised him regularly at school, which so incensed them that in break they went to the Chemist and due to a fortuitous special offer bought laxatives instead of stink bombs, which they secreted into their assailant’s can of Pepsi. This unfortunate boy then had the misfortune of finding himself caught in a diarrhoea attack in the middle of a school hall with no toilets in sight. In light of the terrible mess in the hall it was decided that it should be shut off entirely, forcing Allen to take a massive detour from his usual route through the school and across the path of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So beautiful that he had smiled shyly, feeling his cheeks redden, and her returned smile had left him incomprehensibly changed.
In the short time after that smile he had learnt that her name was Aurora. Perhaps the most beautiful name he had ever heard. The way it rolled off his lips and brought calm to his fleeting mind. At least it had done. But now it was only a cause for sadness as it trembled melodically in his head and made him feel depressed. Each time he was his face in the mirror in reminded him of the sad looking old man in the poster on his wall. Waiting for death to immerse him and maybe thinking of a long lost family whom he had lost contact with and only recently found again, on the verge of calling them when he returned from the beach only to be denied that one happiness by a freak tidal wave and his family cursed by discovering him immortalised in a death mask that screamed from magazine front covers and newspaper stands. To look at his face was to see the saddest man in the world. After all how could anyone who *saw* and *felt* be anything other than sad. He had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Looking at that poster made him think of Aurora and dream of her, only to wake unfulfilled and painfully aware that falling in love inside his head would only hurt him in the end.
Yet he loved her with all of his heart and head because somewhere deep within he knew that loving anyone else after her would be compromise. His only relief came every Tuesday when he would brave the noxious emissions of the smokers’ clique to have a better view of her across the lunch hall and each vision of her he cherished as though it might be his last. Aurora. Bright and shining, radiantly beautiful Aurora. If only she would smile at him again, the same apprehensive smile with her front teeth biting her bottom lip nervously. She was slender with dark black hair and eyes that judged people and distanced her from the others, for as far as he could tell she wasn’t part of any of the school’s factions; she seemed aloof, almost too ethereal for the hustle and bustle of the school halls. Yet she would glide majestically through the crowds of automatons and look sadly for something lost, or someone she wanted to find. It was Allen she wanted to find today. She needed him as much as it was possible for one person to need another. Indeed she had come to the conclusion that she needed him in everything she did and that love was no more than a euphemism for an obsessive need bordering on the psychotic. Today was different though. Her dream had been so vivid that she could feel him in the air and it only served to make her heart beat faster and her yearning more acute. She tried to imagine kissing him as she had been about to in her dream but the shrill rattle of the lesson bell splintered the illusion.
Chance is often mistaken for magic, when it benefits instead of destroys, but there seemed to be magic in the air that day. In reality a gas heater was seeping carbon monoxide into the English classroom, making the teacher, and most of her class, light-headed. The teacher had found out earlier that day that her burgeoning heroin addiction had resulted in her contracting AIDS, unable to come to terms with the enormity of this revelation she had resolved herself to die peacefully of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, in a gas-induced moment of lucidity she decided that as the majority of students neither cared for nor understood the poem they were reading at that moment, she would send the competent students next door and request that the illiterati of the other class be sent to join her, whereupon the able students could learn freely and she could benefit humanity by culling the others in her quest for oblivion.
Aurora walked into the adjacent classroom and passed on the message to the elderly Professor of English, who smiled knowingly and dispatched all of his class bar one into the neighbouring holocaust. Allen’s heart beat soared uncontrollably and he became dizzy and sick as Aurora approached his desk and sat next him as she wanted to do so for so long and she looked at his hands, which fidgeted nervously with a pencil, because he could barely breathe such was the exhilaration he felt at seeing her and today we are going to study Plath the Professor interjected. Before them he placed two copies of the “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and asked them to read the poem while he went to check on the other class. Allen and Aurora were alone in the classroom. She looked at him and smiled nervously and he smiled back, biting his lip, but she didn’t notice as she looked deep into his dark eyes and understood, and at the same time he realised the same thing. Dejectedly they shut their eyes.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
When Aurora opened her eyes he was gone.
When Allen opened his eyes she was gone.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead:
I lift my lids and all is born again.”
The sun shone through the frosted window of the English room door as Aurora sat alone, despondent. Allen sat next to Aurora quietly, unassuming. She looked at him one last time to make sure, to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, but she had. Allen was too dejected to look at her and he smiled wistfully at the memory of Aurora: the girl he had created in his head, a mirror of his own feelings and emotions, part of him; in short, someone who had never and would never exist in this world. Looking into her eyes he had realised that a flickering smile had been transformed into the most beautiful girl in the world. She looked at Allen and smiled sadly; wishing that she could have seen him close up before her mind had spun him into the paragon of everything she had ever wanted in anyone. A dream world lay in tatters as the bell tolled its end on and on and on.
Aurora lay on her bed that night and looked at the poster. Closer than she had ever looked before. The man’s eyes were closed. She could see that now. Not clenched shut like a frightened child’s eyes, but shut as if in a deep sleep, from which the cacophonous crash of the tidal wave could not shiver his mind awake.
Aurora shut her own eyes. Allen was there.
Would you like to dance? Yes please.
And the tidal wave came crashing down.
THE END
Aurora had her nose pressed up against the poster. She was trying, in vain, to look into the old man’s eyes, for in those eyes lay the answer to fathomless depths of questions: maybe even a meaning to this strange life. Yet the photo had obviously been taken from such a distance that any minor details were reduced. Ironically it was possible to see the fear and desperation in the eyes of those who panicked all around the serenity of that old man. He sat there enigmatically, carelessly free and that was why she supposed the picture had been so widely distributed. If he hadn’t been old and bearded she probably would have developed a teenager’s crush on him because even in that wasted body it was still possible to see the ghosted outlines of past attractiveness and she tried to imagine him as a twenty year-old, but her parents would never let her go out with a twenty year-old, so she imagined him as a seventeen year-old and he was very attractive. Yet his beauty wasn’t tangible; he didn’t have film-star looks nor an athlete’s body, he simply had eyes that dreamed wistfully. At least her vision had those eyes. After all how could anyone who *sees* and *feels* not look like the saddest man in the world. She had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
So, reluctantly, she slipped into a deep sleep, her movements suggesting a rapturous dream in which she was dancing with the sad man inside her head. In spirals and pirouettes she was breaking through the layers of melancholy that enveloped him and finding underneath a hopelessly shy smile that shed light on the darkest crevices of her heart. Slowly her eyes raised to his, but they were closed and his head was inclining, arcing and swooping downwards – slowly, gracefully – towards her lips, parting effortlessly and the lights screeched on and shattered her awake. Her mother. It was time for school. Aurora tried desperately to close her eyes and gather the fragments of the shattered dream back into that kiss, but she couldn’t. The vision was lost and a whole dream world had come to ruin in the morning apocalypse. Her heart ached. A low and quietly painful throb that shivered down her spine and tied her stomach in knots. She winced quietly and tried to repress the need to cry that welled up in her throat. But it was too late and she cried quietly, almost imperceptibly, to herself as she was accustomed to do when disasters struck in her life. How would she ever be happy if she couldn’t even find happiness in her dreams?
The school was a monolithic citadel, built in grey bricks and filled with grey people. In a vain effort to hide their insipidness they adorned themselves in the latest garish monstrosities from Nike and Adidas and basked in the collective sense of cool that can only be achieved through mass-marketing to the brain dead. It was a wonder that they did not all open their cans of Pepsi simultaneously and create a sudden carbon dioxide death-trap in the lunch hall. It also amazed her that so many incandescent colours could be rendered so grey when placed on such characterless zombies. Aurora didn’t hate her school. She hated the collection of people who shared it with her. They would toss Salinger to the bottom of their bags at the end of every English lesson and not give a damn about Holden. Daisy’s choice of the dragon over Gatsby, the knight in shining armour waiting pathetically in the bushes, went unnoticed. She hated them for never opening their minds to anything other than what the television told them was cool.
In this climate she wondered how he pulled it off. How he was both popular and sensitive at the same time and so beautiful. Allen. He had been the subject of her dream the last night, because his demeanour had so reminded her of the old man on the poster. He and Allen shared the same intangible beauty that made her knees barely capable of supporting her, that drove her to distraction if he even looked at her and that made her stare at the poster night after night and pray for happiness in her dreams, dreams of him. She liked to watch him and record his pretty ways in her diary, which resembled more a dossier on a murder suspect than a shell of empty thoughts. He was over 6ft tall and disliked people who smoked but on Tuesdays he would sit with the smokers regardless because on that day the younger children occupied his usual seat in the lunch hall, but she was sure that this didn’t mean he disliked young children, just those young children who had a tendency to fight pitched battles with the viscous custard that accompanied Tuesday’s apple pie. He had black hair, darker than her own, that only added to his enigmatic air. Because the only thing tat was tangible about him was that he was an enigma, she saw the way he smiled fakely at everyone who wanted to be his friend, letting them gain for a moment the satisfaction of acceptance even if he did not feel that way.
The love affair inside her head had started when he had smiled at her, but it had been pure and tainted with a shyness that sent waves of seismic euphoria through her heart and had caused her to clutch her books tightly to her breast as a pathetic substitute for his body. From then on he had been the only person in the entire school who transcended the greyness and burst into rainbow colour, an oasis in the barren desert of her life. Allen. And yet he hadn’t seemed to have noticed her ever again. The smile had become a cancer than spread through her body and made her sad by creating a yearning, burning need to see it again. And so she observed him from a distance, sadder than roses in winter.
Freak chance is the only thing we can depend on in life, as in the vacillating annals of time, the only certainty is randomness and the only hope for humanity is to embrace it. So perhaps it is not unfitting that random chance should have played such a large role in Allen’s life too. Who could have predicted the anomalous chain of events that would lead him to seeing Aurora’s captivating smile? It had been a winter’s Tuesday when he had first seen that girl, the one who had plunged him into a world of colour and exhilaration and breathless, desperate pining to see the same licker of a smile that had swept across her face when they had passed each other. The previous evening a freak explosion had taken place at a fireworks factory, but due to a peculiar insurance arrangement it had been necessary to create a scapegoat, one unfortunate man who found himself sacked and then sued for negligence by the insurance company, upon arriving home his wife, having heard the news, finally decided to present him with the divorce papers she had been hiding for two months. Dealt such a terrible blow by Chance the man sought the oblivion of alcohol, and when his son chanced into the living room, having forgotten his schoolbag his father beat him mercilessly in a drunken attempt at catharsis. This boy took out the pent up aggression he now felt for his father on two boys that victimised him regularly at school, which so incensed them that in break they went to the Chemist and due to a fortuitous special offer bought laxatives instead of stink bombs, which they secreted into their assailant’s can of Pepsi. This unfortunate boy then had the misfortune of finding himself caught in a diarrhoea attack in the middle of a school hall with no toilets in sight. In light of the terrible mess in the hall it was decided that it should be shut off entirely, forcing Allen to take a massive detour from his usual route through the school and across the path of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So beautiful that he had smiled shyly, feeling his cheeks redden, and her returned smile had left him incomprehensibly changed.
In the short time after that smile he had learnt that her name was Aurora. Perhaps the most beautiful name he had ever heard. The way it rolled off his lips and brought calm to his fleeting mind. At least it had done. But now it was only a cause for sadness as it trembled melodically in his head and made him feel depressed. Each time he was his face in the mirror in reminded him of the sad looking old man in the poster on his wall. Waiting for death to immerse him and maybe thinking of a long lost family whom he had lost contact with and only recently found again, on the verge of calling them when he returned from the beach only to be denied that one happiness by a freak tidal wave and his family cursed by discovering him immortalised in a death mask that screamed from magazine front covers and newspaper stands. To look at his face was to see the saddest man in the world. After all how could anyone who *saw* and *felt* be anything other than sad. He had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Looking at that poster made him think of Aurora and dream of her, only to wake unfulfilled and painfully aware that falling in love inside his head would only hurt him in the end.
Yet he loved her with all of his heart and head because somewhere deep within he knew that loving anyone else after her would be compromise. His only relief came every Tuesday when he would brave the noxious emissions of the smokers’ clique to have a better view of her across the lunch hall and each vision of her he cherished as though it might be his last. Aurora. Bright and shining, radiantly beautiful Aurora. If only she would smile at him again, the same apprehensive smile with her front teeth biting her bottom lip nervously. She was slender with dark black hair and eyes that judged people and distanced her from the others, for as far as he could tell she wasn’t part of any of the school’s factions; she seemed aloof, almost too ethereal for the hustle and bustle of the school halls. Yet she would glide majestically through the crowds of automatons and look sadly for something lost, or someone she wanted to find. It was Allen she wanted to find today. She needed him as much as it was possible for one person to need another. Indeed she had come to the conclusion that she needed him in everything she did and that love was no more than a euphemism for an obsessive need bordering on the psychotic. Today was different though. Her dream had been so vivid that she could feel him in the air and it only served to make her heart beat faster and her yearning more acute. She tried to imagine kissing him as she had been about to in her dream but the shrill rattle of the lesson bell splintered the illusion.
Chance is often mistaken for magic, when it benefits instead of destroys, but there seemed to be magic in the air that day. In reality a gas heater was seeping carbon monoxide into the English classroom, making the teacher, and most of her class, light-headed. The teacher had found out earlier that day that her burgeoning heroin addiction had resulted in her contracting AIDS, unable to come to terms with the enormity of this revelation she had resolved herself to die peacefully of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, in a gas-induced moment of lucidity she decided that as the majority of students neither cared for nor understood the poem they were reading at that moment, she would send the competent students next door and request that the illiterati of the other class be sent to join her, whereupon the able students could learn freely and she could benefit humanity by culling the others in her quest for oblivion.
Aurora walked into the adjacent classroom and passed on the message to the elderly Professor of English, who smiled knowingly and dispatched all of his class bar one into the neighbouring holocaust. Allen’s heart beat soared uncontrollably and he became dizzy and sick as Aurora approached his desk and sat next him as she wanted to do so for so long and she looked at his hands, which fidgeted nervously with a pencil, because he could barely breathe such was the exhilaration he felt at seeing her and today we are going to study Plath the Professor interjected. Before them he placed two copies of the “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and asked them to read the poem while he went to check on the other class. Allen and Aurora were alone in the classroom. She looked at him and smiled nervously and he smiled back, biting his lip, but she didn’t notice as she looked deep into his dark eyes and understood, and at the same time he realised the same thing. Dejectedly they shut their eyes.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
When Aurora opened her eyes he was gone.
When Allen opened his eyes she was gone.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead:
I lift my lids and all is born again.”
The sun shone through the frosted window of the English room door as Aurora sat alone, despondent. Allen sat next to Aurora quietly, unassuming. She looked at him one last time to make sure, to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, but she had. Allen was too dejected to look at her and he smiled wistfully at the memory of Aurora: the girl he had created in his head, a mirror of his own feelings and emotions, part of him; in short, someone who had never and would never exist in this world. Looking into her eyes he had realised that a flickering smile had been transformed into the most beautiful girl in the world. She looked at Allen and smiled sadly; wishing that she could have seen him close up before her mind had spun him into the paragon of everything she had ever wanted in anyone. A dream world lay in tatters as the bell tolled its end on and on and on.
Aurora lay on her bed that night and looked at the poster. Closer than she had ever looked before. The man’s eyes were closed. She could see that now. Not clenched shut like a frightened child’s eyes, but shut as if in a deep sleep, from which the cacophonous crash of the tidal wave could not shiver his mind awake.
Aurora shut her own eyes. Allen was there.
Would you like to dance? Yes please.
And the tidal wave came crashing down.
THE END
Page:
Mr. Happy wrote:
"It's about my fears."
Believe me, I understand.
"I'm meeting someone in under a month who I've not seen for years. But we have spoken and written and I'm afraid that I've created her into more than she can be in my head. Afraid that the girl inside my head is too perfect and too unrealistic... I don't know..."
Oh yes... :0) I won't say "I know how you feel", but believe me, you aren't the only one. It's pretty amazing to meet someone utterly perfect... and yet not meet them. Your mind can't cope with it... it tries to find excuses, flaws, just so you can dumb down the blow that you'll get when you meet her... because she isn't perfect, even though you've seen the photos, you've spoke so long on the phone... your minds meet together as one, and for the first time you can speak, you can speak so freely and openly, and you're not just in love, you feel like she's a part OF you... something so close, you find it too good to be true. So your mind tells you you've made it up, it's just all a dream... So yes, you aren't the only one. :0)
"I've spoken to her for 6 hours straight on the phone. And for me that's incredible. Mr.Drying-up-in-conversation."
And you aren't the only one. :0D Had my phone six months, during that time I spent about four pound on it. I've spent about £75 in the last two months, since we've met. I am now officially skint. :0D
"It's personalities and interests that your mind creates for a mental image that are the killers."
Never actually had that problem... well, not that I can remember. Did kinda wonder that if it was tastes that made a person... but not at all any more. Always nice to have quite a few of the same tastes though. :0)
"Anyway thanks for reading it, it means a lot :-)"
No problem, not as if I have anything better to do. :0)
"Oh and I am going to read all of yours after my exams... or at least everything that you've written up to that point, it looks like you'll have a full-blown book by the time it's finished :-D"
Yup. For 'some' reason I'm writing a lot recently. :0) Thanks.
"It's about my fears."
Believe me, I understand.
"I'm meeting someone in under a month who I've not seen for years. But we have spoken and written and I'm afraid that I've created her into more than she can be in my head. Afraid that the girl inside my head is too perfect and too unrealistic... I don't know..."
Oh yes... :0) I won't say "I know how you feel", but believe me, you aren't the only one. It's pretty amazing to meet someone utterly perfect... and yet not meet them. Your mind can't cope with it... it tries to find excuses, flaws, just so you can dumb down the blow that you'll get when you meet her... because she isn't perfect, even though you've seen the photos, you've spoke so long on the phone... your minds meet together as one, and for the first time you can speak, you can speak so freely and openly, and you're not just in love, you feel like she's a part OF you... something so close, you find it too good to be true. So your mind tells you you've made it up, it's just all a dream... So yes, you aren't the only one. :0)
"I've spoken to her for 6 hours straight on the phone. And for me that's incredible. Mr.Drying-up-in-conversation."
And you aren't the only one. :0D Had my phone six months, during that time I spent about four pound on it. I've spent about £75 in the last two months, since we've met. I am now officially skint. :0D
"It's personalities and interests that your mind creates for a mental image that are the killers."
Never actually had that problem... well, not that I can remember. Did kinda wonder that if it was tastes that made a person... but not at all any more. Always nice to have quite a few of the same tastes though. :0)
"Anyway thanks for reading it, it means a lot :-)"
No problem, not as if I have anything better to do. :0)
"Oh and I am going to read all of yours after my exams... or at least everything that you've written up to that point, it looks like you'll have a full-blown book by the time it's finished :-D"
Yup. For 'some' reason I'm writing a lot recently. :0) Thanks.
Yeah Alicia. She's beautiful, popular and intelligent and in England for a whole month and I can barely wait.
but I'm scared.
(and she even likes Kevin Smith films.. how cool is that?)
but I'm scared.
(and she even likes Kevin Smith films.. how cool is that?)
Brilliant. This would be Alicia, the one from America? I remember you writing a post about her a while ago. Good luck anyway. She's probably as nervous as you are anyway. I'm as nervous as hell about meeting a girl that I've met once before. It's up to me when I meet her, and I want it to be sooner than later, but I really am more nervous than I've ever been.
It's about my fears.
I'm meeting someone in under a month who I've not seen for years. But we have spoken and written and I'm afraid that I've created her into more than she can be in my head. Afraid that the girl inside my head is too perfect and too unrealistic... I don't know...
I've spoken to her for 6 hours straight on the phone. And for me that's incredible. Mr.Drying-up-in-conversation. I once went on a date with a girl I'd met on a law course and my mind fizzled into nothingness. It was the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. I couldn't think of a single thing to say. And it rained. And the restaurant we were going to go to had closed down. Disaster date.
But you see I had lived it all out in my head before I went and when I met her she was completely different from how I had been imagining her. And it's got nothing to do with appearence. It's personalities and interests that your mind creates for a mental image that are the killers.
Anyway thanks for reading it, it means a lot :-)
Oh and I am going to read all of yours after my exams... or at least everything that you've written up to that point, it looks like you'll have a full-blown book by the time it's finished :-D
I'm meeting someone in under a month who I've not seen for years. But we have spoken and written and I'm afraid that I've created her into more than she can be in my head. Afraid that the girl inside my head is too perfect and too unrealistic... I don't know...
I've spoken to her for 6 hours straight on the phone. And for me that's incredible. Mr.Drying-up-in-conversation. I once went on a date with a girl I'd met on a law course and my mind fizzled into nothingness. It was the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. I couldn't think of a single thing to say. And it rained. And the restaurant we were going to go to had closed down. Disaster date.
But you see I had lived it all out in my head before I went and when I met her she was completely different from how I had been imagining her. And it's got nothing to do with appearence. It's personalities and interests that your mind creates for a mental image that are the killers.
Anyway thanks for reading it, it means a lot :-)
Oh and I am going to read all of yours after my exams... or at least everything that you've written up to that point, it looks like you'll have a full-blown book by the time it's finished :-D
At first I found that difficult to get into... but christ, I got stuck in that after a while... that's probably the best piece of writing I've ever read on these forums ever.
Fantastically beautiful images, you really captured a fantastic atmosphere... wow, really. Sometimes I feel myself that there are some things that happen to me... seem so perfect, that I not only expect them to go horribly wrong, but for me to realise that it was never there to begin with, just a made up vision in my head, because I refuse to live anymore without my simple comforts.
The story I'm writing now is parallel to this in many ways... but while you go for the detailed and beautiful writing that I couldn't possibly do, I just rely more on conversation and actions, small little simple kick offs.
Fantastic writing. Glad I read that.
Fantastically beautiful images, you really captured a fantastic atmosphere... wow, really. Sometimes I feel myself that there are some things that happen to me... seem so perfect, that I not only expect them to go horribly wrong, but for me to realise that it was never there to begin with, just a made up vision in my head, because I refuse to live anymore without my simple comforts.
The story I'm writing now is parallel to this in many ways... but while you go for the detailed and beautiful writing that I couldn't possibly do, I just rely more on conversation and actions, small little simple kick offs.
Fantastic writing. Glad I read that.
Alan stands and waits for a train. Little does he know that this is to be the last day of his life. As the train arrives, his cholesterol ravaged heart finally gives up the struggle to pump life-sustaining blood through fat-soaked arteries. As Alan falls to the floor a significant enough shift in the air takes place that two hours later a freak tidal wave rises up on an Australian beach strewn with sun-seeking holiday-makers. Ignorant of the futility of their actions the tourists try to flee the towering oblivion. But one man sits alone in the melee; waiting for a fate that he sees is inevitable. Perhaps he is Poseidon awaiting the comfort of his watery kingdom and already dreaming of a transfigured Atlantis. It doesn’t matter to the struggling photographer who takes a photo of this freak occurrence through an uncaring telephoto lens that will make him a millionaire and provide the youth of a generation with a Tiananmen Square Kodak moment. This evening one such youth, a slender girl called Aurora, sits on her bed and looks at the poster and wonders what the man is thinking. Little does she know that the next day is to be the last of her life. If she had done then the course of the next day would have taken on a poeticism appreciated by all. However, she does not and though ignorance truly is bliss, in this case we can only smile forlornly at the tragedy that befalls anyone who lives in their dreams.
Aurora had her nose pressed up against the poster. She was trying, in vain, to look into the old man’s eyes, for in those eyes lay the answer to fathomless depths of questions: maybe even a meaning to this strange life. Yet the photo had obviously been taken from such a distance that any minor details were reduced. Ironically it was possible to see the fear and desperation in the eyes of those who panicked all around the serenity of that old man. He sat there enigmatically, carelessly free and that was why she supposed the picture had been so widely distributed. If he hadn’t been old and bearded she probably would have developed a teenager’s crush on him because even in that wasted body it was still possible to see the ghosted outlines of past attractiveness and she tried to imagine him as a twenty year-old, but her parents would never let her go out with a twenty year-old, so she imagined him as a seventeen year-old and he was very attractive. Yet his beauty wasn’t tangible; he didn’t have film-star looks nor an athlete’s body, he simply had eyes that dreamed wistfully. At least her vision had those eyes. After all how could anyone who *sees* and *feels* not look like the saddest man in the world. She had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
So, reluctantly, she slipped into a deep sleep, her movements suggesting a rapturous dream in which she was dancing with the sad man inside her head. In spirals and pirouettes she was breaking through the layers of melancholy that enveloped him and finding underneath a hopelessly shy smile that shed light on the darkest crevices of her heart. Slowly her eyes raised to his, but they were closed and his head was inclining, arcing and swooping downwards – slowly, gracefully – towards her lips, parting effortlessly and the lights screeched on and shattered her awake. Her mother. It was time for school. Aurora tried desperately to close her eyes and gather the fragments of the shattered dream back into that kiss, but she couldn’t. The vision was lost and a whole dream world had come to ruin in the morning apocalypse. Her heart ached. A low and quietly painful throb that shivered down her spine and tied her stomach in knots. She winced quietly and tried to repress the need to cry that welled up in her throat. But it was too late and she cried quietly, almost imperceptibly, to herself as she was accustomed to do when disasters struck in her life. How would she ever be happy if she couldn’t even find happiness in her dreams?
The school was a monolithic citadel, built in grey bricks and filled with grey people. In a vain effort to hide their insipidness they adorned themselves in the latest garish monstrosities from Nike and Adidas and basked in the collective sense of cool that can only be achieved through mass-marketing to the brain dead. It was a wonder that they did not all open their cans of Pepsi simultaneously and create a sudden carbon dioxide death-trap in the lunch hall. It also amazed her that so many incandescent colours could be rendered so grey when placed on such characterless zombies. Aurora didn’t hate her school. She hated the collection of people who shared it with her. They would toss Salinger to the bottom of their bags at the end of every English lesson and not give a damn about Holden. Daisy’s choice of the dragon over Gatsby, the knight in shining armour waiting pathetically in the bushes, went unnoticed. She hated them for never opening their minds to anything other than what the television told them was cool.
In this climate she wondered how he pulled it off. How he was both popular and sensitive at the same time and so beautiful. Allen. He had been the subject of her dream the last night, because his demeanour had so reminded her of the old man on the poster. He and Allen shared the same intangible beauty that made her knees barely capable of supporting her, that drove her to distraction if he even looked at her and that made her stare at the poster night after night and pray for happiness in her dreams, dreams of him. She liked to watch him and record his pretty ways in her diary, which resembled more a dossier on a murder suspect than a shell of empty thoughts. He was over 6ft tall and disliked people who smoked but on Tuesdays he would sit with the smokers regardless because on that day the younger children occupied his usual seat in the lunch hall, but she was sure that this didn’t mean he disliked young children, just those young children who had a tendency to fight pitched battles with the viscous custard that accompanied Tuesday’s apple pie. He had black hair, darker than her own, that only added to his enigmatic air. Because the only thing tat was tangible about him was that he was an enigma, she saw the way he smiled fakely at everyone who wanted to be his friend, letting them gain for a moment the satisfaction of acceptance even if he did not feel that way.
The love affair inside her head had started when he had smiled at her, but it had been pure and tainted with a shyness that sent waves of seismic euphoria through her heart and had caused her to clutch her books tightly to her breast as a pathetic substitute for his body. From then on he had been the only person in the entire school who transcended the greyness and burst into rainbow colour, an oasis in the barren desert of her life. Allen. And yet he hadn’t seemed to have noticed her ever again. The smile had become a cancer than spread through her body and made her sad by creating a yearning, burning need to see it again. And so she observed him from a distance, sadder than roses in winter.
Freak chance is the only thing we can depend on in life, as in the vacillating annals of time, the only certainty is randomness and the only hope for humanity is to embrace it. So perhaps it is not unfitting that random chance should have played such a large role in Allen’s life too. Who could have predicted the anomalous chain of events that would lead him to seeing Aurora’s captivating smile? It had been a winter’s Tuesday when he had first seen that girl, the one who had plunged him into a world of colour and exhilaration and breathless, desperate pining to see the same licker of a smile that had swept across her face when they had passed each other. The previous evening a freak explosion had taken place at a fireworks factory, but due to a peculiar insurance arrangement it had been necessary to create a scapegoat, one unfortunate man who found himself sacked and then sued for negligence by the insurance company, upon arriving home his wife, having heard the news, finally decided to present him with the divorce papers she had been hiding for two months. Dealt such a terrible blow by Chance the man sought the oblivion of alcohol, and when his son chanced into the living room, having forgotten his schoolbag his father beat him mercilessly in a drunken attempt at catharsis. This boy took out the pent up aggression he now felt for his father on two boys that victimised him regularly at school, which so incensed them that in break they went to the Chemist and due to a fortuitous special offer bought laxatives instead of stink bombs, which they secreted into their assailant’s can of Pepsi. This unfortunate boy then had the misfortune of finding himself caught in a diarrhoea attack in the middle of a school hall with no toilets in sight. In light of the terrible mess in the hall it was decided that it should be shut off entirely, forcing Allen to take a massive detour from his usual route through the school and across the path of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So beautiful that he had smiled shyly, feeling his cheeks redden, and her returned smile had left him incomprehensibly changed.
In the short time after that smile he had learnt that her name was Aurora. Perhaps the most beautiful name he had ever heard. The way it rolled off his lips and brought calm to his fleeting mind. At least it had done. But now it was only a cause for sadness as it trembled melodically in his head and made him feel depressed. Each time he was his face in the mirror in reminded him of the sad looking old man in the poster on his wall. Waiting for death to immerse him and maybe thinking of a long lost family whom he had lost contact with and only recently found again, on the verge of calling them when he returned from the beach only to be denied that one happiness by a freak tidal wave and his family cursed by discovering him immortalised in a death mask that screamed from magazine front covers and newspaper stands. To look at his face was to see the saddest man in the world. After all how could anyone who *saw* and *felt* be anything other than sad. He had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Looking at that poster made him think of Aurora and dream of her, only to wake unfulfilled and painfully aware that falling in love inside his head would only hurt him in the end.
Yet he loved her with all of his heart and head because somewhere deep within he knew that loving anyone else after her would be compromise. His only relief came every Tuesday when he would brave the noxious emissions of the smokers’ clique to have a better view of her across the lunch hall and each vision of her he cherished as though it might be his last. Aurora. Bright and shining, radiantly beautiful Aurora. If only she would smile at him again, the same apprehensive smile with her front teeth biting her bottom lip nervously. She was slender with dark black hair and eyes that judged people and distanced her from the others, for as far as he could tell she wasn’t part of any of the school’s factions; she seemed aloof, almost too ethereal for the hustle and bustle of the school halls. Yet she would glide majestically through the crowds of automatons and look sadly for something lost, or someone she wanted to find. It was Allen she wanted to find today. She needed him as much as it was possible for one person to need another. Indeed she had come to the conclusion that she needed him in everything she did and that love was no more than a euphemism for an obsessive need bordering on the psychotic. Today was different though. Her dream had been so vivid that she could feel him in the air and it only served to make her heart beat faster and her yearning more acute. She tried to imagine kissing him as she had been about to in her dream but the shrill rattle of the lesson bell splintered the illusion.
Chance is often mistaken for magic, when it benefits instead of destroys, but there seemed to be magic in the air that day. In reality a gas heater was seeping carbon monoxide into the English classroom, making the teacher, and most of her class, light-headed. The teacher had found out earlier that day that her burgeoning heroin addiction had resulted in her contracting AIDS, unable to come to terms with the enormity of this revelation she had resolved herself to die peacefully of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, in a gas-induced moment of lucidity she decided that as the majority of students neither cared for nor understood the poem they were reading at that moment, she would send the competent students next door and request that the illiterati of the other class be sent to join her, whereupon the able students could learn freely and she could benefit humanity by culling the others in her quest for oblivion.
Aurora walked into the adjacent classroom and passed on the message to the elderly Professor of English, who smiled knowingly and dispatched all of his class bar one into the neighbouring holocaust. Allen’s heart beat soared uncontrollably and he became dizzy and sick as Aurora approached his desk and sat next him as she wanted to do so for so long and she looked at his hands, which fidgeted nervously with a pencil, because he could barely breathe such was the exhilaration he felt at seeing her and today we are going to study Plath the Professor interjected. Before them he placed two copies of the “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and asked them to read the poem while he went to check on the other class. Allen and Aurora were alone in the classroom. She looked at him and smiled nervously and he smiled back, biting his lip, but she didn’t notice as she looked deep into his dark eyes and understood, and at the same time he realised the same thing. Dejectedly they shut their eyes.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
When Aurora opened her eyes he was gone.
When Allen opened his eyes she was gone.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead:
I lift my lids and all is born again.”
The sun shone through the frosted window of the English room door as Aurora sat alone, despondent. Allen sat next to Aurora quietly, unassuming. She looked at him one last time to make sure, to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, but she had. Allen was too dejected to look at her and he smiled wistfully at the memory of Aurora: the girl he had created in his head, a mirror of his own feelings and emotions, part of him; in short, someone who had never and would never exist in this world. Looking into her eyes he had realised that a flickering smile had been transformed into the most beautiful girl in the world. She looked at Allen and smiled sadly; wishing that she could have seen him close up before her mind had spun him into the paragon of everything she had ever wanted in anyone. A dream world lay in tatters as the bell tolled its end on and on and on.
Aurora lay on her bed that night and looked at the poster. Closer than she had ever looked before. The man’s eyes were closed. She could see that now. Not clenched shut like a frightened child’s eyes, but shut as if in a deep sleep, from which the cacophonous crash of the tidal wave could not shiver his mind awake.
Aurora shut her own eyes. Allen was there.
Would you like to dance? Yes please.
And the tidal wave came crashing down.
THE END
Aurora had her nose pressed up against the poster. She was trying, in vain, to look into the old man’s eyes, for in those eyes lay the answer to fathomless depths of questions: maybe even a meaning to this strange life. Yet the photo had obviously been taken from such a distance that any minor details were reduced. Ironically it was possible to see the fear and desperation in the eyes of those who panicked all around the serenity of that old man. He sat there enigmatically, carelessly free and that was why she supposed the picture had been so widely distributed. If he hadn’t been old and bearded she probably would have developed a teenager’s crush on him because even in that wasted body it was still possible to see the ghosted outlines of past attractiveness and she tried to imagine him as a twenty year-old, but her parents would never let her go out with a twenty year-old, so she imagined him as a seventeen year-old and he was very attractive. Yet his beauty wasn’t tangible; he didn’t have film-star looks nor an athlete’s body, he simply had eyes that dreamed wistfully. At least her vision had those eyes. After all how could anyone who *sees* and *feels* not look like the saddest man in the world. She had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
So, reluctantly, she slipped into a deep sleep, her movements suggesting a rapturous dream in which she was dancing with the sad man inside her head. In spirals and pirouettes she was breaking through the layers of melancholy that enveloped him and finding underneath a hopelessly shy smile that shed light on the darkest crevices of her heart. Slowly her eyes raised to his, but they were closed and his head was inclining, arcing and swooping downwards – slowly, gracefully – towards her lips, parting effortlessly and the lights screeched on and shattered her awake. Her mother. It was time for school. Aurora tried desperately to close her eyes and gather the fragments of the shattered dream back into that kiss, but she couldn’t. The vision was lost and a whole dream world had come to ruin in the morning apocalypse. Her heart ached. A low and quietly painful throb that shivered down her spine and tied her stomach in knots. She winced quietly and tried to repress the need to cry that welled up in her throat. But it was too late and she cried quietly, almost imperceptibly, to herself as she was accustomed to do when disasters struck in her life. How would she ever be happy if she couldn’t even find happiness in her dreams?
The school was a monolithic citadel, built in grey bricks and filled with grey people. In a vain effort to hide their insipidness they adorned themselves in the latest garish monstrosities from Nike and Adidas and basked in the collective sense of cool that can only be achieved through mass-marketing to the brain dead. It was a wonder that they did not all open their cans of Pepsi simultaneously and create a sudden carbon dioxide death-trap in the lunch hall. It also amazed her that so many incandescent colours could be rendered so grey when placed on such characterless zombies. Aurora didn’t hate her school. She hated the collection of people who shared it with her. They would toss Salinger to the bottom of their bags at the end of every English lesson and not give a damn about Holden. Daisy’s choice of the dragon over Gatsby, the knight in shining armour waiting pathetically in the bushes, went unnoticed. She hated them for never opening their minds to anything other than what the television told them was cool.
In this climate she wondered how he pulled it off. How he was both popular and sensitive at the same time and so beautiful. Allen. He had been the subject of her dream the last night, because his demeanour had so reminded her of the old man on the poster. He and Allen shared the same intangible beauty that made her knees barely capable of supporting her, that drove her to distraction if he even looked at her and that made her stare at the poster night after night and pray for happiness in her dreams, dreams of him. She liked to watch him and record his pretty ways in her diary, which resembled more a dossier on a murder suspect than a shell of empty thoughts. He was over 6ft tall and disliked people who smoked but on Tuesdays he would sit with the smokers regardless because on that day the younger children occupied his usual seat in the lunch hall, but she was sure that this didn’t mean he disliked young children, just those young children who had a tendency to fight pitched battles with the viscous custard that accompanied Tuesday’s apple pie. He had black hair, darker than her own, that only added to his enigmatic air. Because the only thing tat was tangible about him was that he was an enigma, she saw the way he smiled fakely at everyone who wanted to be his friend, letting them gain for a moment the satisfaction of acceptance even if he did not feel that way.
The love affair inside her head had started when he had smiled at her, but it had been pure and tainted with a shyness that sent waves of seismic euphoria through her heart and had caused her to clutch her books tightly to her breast as a pathetic substitute for his body. From then on he had been the only person in the entire school who transcended the greyness and burst into rainbow colour, an oasis in the barren desert of her life. Allen. And yet he hadn’t seemed to have noticed her ever again. The smile had become a cancer than spread through her body and made her sad by creating a yearning, burning need to see it again. And so she observed him from a distance, sadder than roses in winter.
Freak chance is the only thing we can depend on in life, as in the vacillating annals of time, the only certainty is randomness and the only hope for humanity is to embrace it. So perhaps it is not unfitting that random chance should have played such a large role in Allen’s life too. Who could have predicted the anomalous chain of events that would lead him to seeing Aurora’s captivating smile? It had been a winter’s Tuesday when he had first seen that girl, the one who had plunged him into a world of colour and exhilaration and breathless, desperate pining to see the same licker of a smile that had swept across her face when they had passed each other. The previous evening a freak explosion had taken place at a fireworks factory, but due to a peculiar insurance arrangement it had been necessary to create a scapegoat, one unfortunate man who found himself sacked and then sued for negligence by the insurance company, upon arriving home his wife, having heard the news, finally decided to present him with the divorce papers she had been hiding for two months. Dealt such a terrible blow by Chance the man sought the oblivion of alcohol, and when his son chanced into the living room, having forgotten his schoolbag his father beat him mercilessly in a drunken attempt at catharsis. This boy took out the pent up aggression he now felt for his father on two boys that victimised him regularly at school, which so incensed them that in break they went to the Chemist and due to a fortuitous special offer bought laxatives instead of stink bombs, which they secreted into their assailant’s can of Pepsi. This unfortunate boy then had the misfortune of finding himself caught in a diarrhoea attack in the middle of a school hall with no toilets in sight. In light of the terrible mess in the hall it was decided that it should be shut off entirely, forcing Allen to take a massive detour from his usual route through the school and across the path of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. So beautiful that he had smiled shyly, feeling his cheeks redden, and her returned smile had left him incomprehensibly changed.
In the short time after that smile he had learnt that her name was Aurora. Perhaps the most beautiful name he had ever heard. The way it rolled off his lips and brought calm to his fleeting mind. At least it had done. But now it was only a cause for sadness as it trembled melodically in his head and made him feel depressed. Each time he was his face in the mirror in reminded him of the sad looking old man in the poster on his wall. Waiting for death to immerse him and maybe thinking of a long lost family whom he had lost contact with and only recently found again, on the verge of calling them when he returned from the beach only to be denied that one happiness by a freak tidal wave and his family cursed by discovering him immortalised in a death mask that screamed from magazine front covers and newspaper stands. To look at his face was to see the saddest man in the world. After all how could anyone who *saw* and *felt* be anything other than sad. He had read that somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Looking at that poster made him think of Aurora and dream of her, only to wake unfulfilled and painfully aware that falling in love inside his head would only hurt him in the end.
Yet he loved her with all of his heart and head because somewhere deep within he knew that loving anyone else after her would be compromise. His only relief came every Tuesday when he would brave the noxious emissions of the smokers’ clique to have a better view of her across the lunch hall and each vision of her he cherished as though it might be his last. Aurora. Bright and shining, radiantly beautiful Aurora. If only she would smile at him again, the same apprehensive smile with her front teeth biting her bottom lip nervously. She was slender with dark black hair and eyes that judged people and distanced her from the others, for as far as he could tell she wasn’t part of any of the school’s factions; she seemed aloof, almost too ethereal for the hustle and bustle of the school halls. Yet she would glide majestically through the crowds of automatons and look sadly for something lost, or someone she wanted to find. It was Allen she wanted to find today. She needed him as much as it was possible for one person to need another. Indeed she had come to the conclusion that she needed him in everything she did and that love was no more than a euphemism for an obsessive need bordering on the psychotic. Today was different though. Her dream had been so vivid that she could feel him in the air and it only served to make her heart beat faster and her yearning more acute. She tried to imagine kissing him as she had been about to in her dream but the shrill rattle of the lesson bell splintered the illusion.
Chance is often mistaken for magic, when it benefits instead of destroys, but there seemed to be magic in the air that day. In reality a gas heater was seeping carbon monoxide into the English classroom, making the teacher, and most of her class, light-headed. The teacher had found out earlier that day that her burgeoning heroin addiction had resulted in her contracting AIDS, unable to come to terms with the enormity of this revelation she had resolved herself to die peacefully of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, in a gas-induced moment of lucidity she decided that as the majority of students neither cared for nor understood the poem they were reading at that moment, she would send the competent students next door and request that the illiterati of the other class be sent to join her, whereupon the able students could learn freely and she could benefit humanity by culling the others in her quest for oblivion.
Aurora walked into the adjacent classroom and passed on the message to the elderly Professor of English, who smiled knowingly and dispatched all of his class bar one into the neighbouring holocaust. Allen’s heart beat soared uncontrollably and he became dizzy and sick as Aurora approached his desk and sat next him as she wanted to do so for so long and she looked at his hands, which fidgeted nervously with a pencil, because he could barely breathe such was the exhilaration he felt at seeing her and today we are going to study Plath the Professor interjected. Before them he placed two copies of the “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and asked them to read the poem while he went to check on the other class. Allen and Aurora were alone in the classroom. She looked at him and smiled nervously and he smiled back, biting his lip, but she didn’t notice as she looked deep into his dark eyes and understood, and at the same time he realised the same thing. Dejectedly they shut their eyes.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
When Aurora opened her eyes he was gone.
When Allen opened his eyes she was gone.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead:
I lift my lids and all is born again.”
The sun shone through the frosted window of the English room door as Aurora sat alone, despondent. Allen sat next to Aurora quietly, unassuming. She looked at him one last time to make sure, to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, but she had. Allen was too dejected to look at her and he smiled wistfully at the memory of Aurora: the girl he had created in his head, a mirror of his own feelings and emotions, part of him; in short, someone who had never and would never exist in this world. Looking into her eyes he had realised that a flickering smile had been transformed into the most beautiful girl in the world. She looked at Allen and smiled sadly; wishing that she could have seen him close up before her mind had spun him into the paragon of everything she had ever wanted in anyone. A dream world lay in tatters as the bell tolled its end on and on and on.
Aurora lay on her bed that night and looked at the poster. Closer than she had ever looked before. The man’s eyes were closed. She could see that now. Not clenched shut like a frightened child’s eyes, but shut as if in a deep sleep, from which the cacophonous crash of the tidal wave could not shiver his mind awake.
Aurora shut her own eyes. Allen was there.
Would you like to dance? Yes please.
And the tidal wave came crashing down.
THE END
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