Prompt #38: Obsession
Title: Goodbye Sunglasses
Character: Britney Spears
Canon: RP
Note: This is my first time writing RP fic.



First:
the photographers stopped.

A man with a camera in his hand who was running across the road and had nearly gotten run over by a car turned around, placed a cover on its lens, and walked away. When he undid the lens it was only to take photograph of a bird that was in flight, a flower in bloom, a raindrop in mid-air.

The crowd of men with bright flashing lights who had gathered outside and pressed themselves upon the tinted glass window in a desperate attempt to catch a single glimpse of her, faces pressed, noses flattened, and airways hindered, who had themselves armed with cameras all large and black and bulky, slowly lowered their arms and distanced themselves from the window. Then they walked away, hoping not to miss the next bus home.

Then:
the tabloid editors resigned.

At a table in an office for a glossy magazine was a woman who was tidying up all her belongings. There were boxes and boxes in the office, full of pieces of paper, small kitschy paperweights that had been given to her as presents, fancy stationary, computer periphery. The only things that did not go into the boxes were the photographs. They were littered across the table: most of them grainy, some of higher quality, and all ignored. The woman walked out of her office carrying one box out, and then went back in to take another out, and then another, and then another. Finally, she walked out of her office empty handed, and shut the door behind her. There was a small 'click' in the door lock, and then silence.

Meanwhile:

"So this means that I have two wishes left."

"You'll have to use them carefully. I can grant wishes but I can't undo consequences."

"Those fucking assholes are gone. I have no regrets."

"What are you going to do next?"

The blonde young woman, now nameless, stepped out of the store into the sunlight, and took off her sunglasses.

"I don't know," she replied. "Take a walk, I guess. Go shopping, maybe. Think I'll go grab a Starbucks. Do you know why stars always wear sunglasses?"

Later:
the people forgot.

The magazines that were splattered with large and bright lettering and gaudy photographs were left in their display shelves, untouched. In the months to pass they began to rot, and the store owners began to wonder why they had agreed to place them on those shelves. After they were discarded the shelves were filled with magazines about fiction, poetry, and art. People began to discuss human rights, and things like freedom, and resolving world conflict amongst themselves.

But as time passed the people's obsession with world conflicts and fighting for human rights made things worse. Everyone began to give his or her opinions, and no one wanted to be proven wrong. In time the bright letterings and the gaudy photographs returned, only this time, those celebrated were criminals, conmen, and politicians. Because these people were always talked about and always remembered people began to believe that it was worth doing evil in order to achieve their fame and notoriety: the greatest fear of a human being, after all, is to be erased. So some committed murder, and some committed crime, and some joined militants in order to be martyred, only so that they could have that place in history and would never be erased.

The blonde young woman who made that wish on that day never saw any of these things happened; they all happened many years after her passing. No one remembers her walking into that store in Los Angeles on that day, for she was nothing very remarkable after all. You will not know her if you were to seek through historical records in the form clippings of old newspapers or archives of old magazines and online sources. But if you take a trip to Louisiana and visit a little church, you will see a completely unremarkable tombstone with her name engraved upon it, melting into the millions of names that disappeared into the void of non-existence, disappearing into the forgotten and the unknown.