- (tinieblas) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-17 22:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | surreal |
Who: Sera
What: Narrative
Where: Home, a Meetup.
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Adult themes in here, ppls.
Las Vegas was not what she'd been expecting. When Sera made the decision to leave home, her adoptive parents had called her ingenue, credula. They had worried over her mental state, and they had wrung their hands. Her adoptive papà had run his hand over his thinning grey hair over and over, the mannerism one that Sera knew from the moment he had found her that day, all those years go, when Angelo had left her behind. Her adoptive mamma had called the doctor that had been treating Sera since the incident with Sebastian. But there had been no stopping her, and now here she was, and nothing was as she'd expected it would be.
The city was arid, unforgiving dryness on skin born near water. Whimsy, and she could imagine herself a mermaid cast ashore, her scales drying out in the cruel heat, her heart far away and somewhere blue. Whimsy, and she could imagine the walls of her house a prison, one that she'd chosen because the cold tiles reminded her so much of Ravello, of how her bare feet slapped against the floor there. But there was no rush of tides in the morning here, no gulls, no smell of breakfast wafting from the kitchens. Here, there was no maid to ensure she dress, and her mamma did not poke her head into the room and admonish her to stop writing, lest she waste away to nothing. And her papà was nowhere to be found, no bear arms, no hugs that were so tight she couldn't breathe.
Here, there was quiet in the mornings.
Here, she wrote until her stomach protested, the sun already high in the sky, the day almost gone.
(Supplication, and upon the bed, she stretched out her body, arms spread like Jesus upon his cross, legs defiant of any attempt at nails, spread wide until the muscles of her thighs burned. The lance that pierced her side was figurative, a hand broad and unforgiving, drawing more than blood and water from her flesh. And she thought, as she waited for a sip of relief, why she was there, naked upon dingy sheets with a man she had not known before the morning?)
She wrote.
Her stories, once fanciful things full of white dresses and altars, changed.
Forever gone was the white knight, blond hair and blue eyes, broad shoulders and lies. In his place, dark thoughts and dark themes, and she would have had to hide these pages at home; her mamma would have called the doctor.
But Sera didn't need a doctor. The typewriter ding, ding, dinged, the sound soothing enough that she kept the heavy machine, even with lighter, inoffensive alternatives. But she was paper, stacks of it, and that ding. She didn't want to publish anything. She savored her mistakes. What were mistakes, save truth? She marked the pages after, and she drank a little wine and ate a little bread as she curled up on the couch and visited the internet. A city in its own right, the internet felt much more like home than Las Vegas. The houses and stores there were familiar, and her friends were always available.
And then it was night, and she was left restless, prowling, written out, talked out, and always inching toward something that she hadn't yet braved. Meetups were for evenings, and she'd gone to nearly a dozen since arriving in Vegas. Innocuous groups discussing flowers, troubled groups discussing deaths, dark groups discussing sex.
It was the latter that drew her that night.
She was a small thing in a plastic chair. Slim jeans and a snug shirt and eyes the color of haunted evenings. Risk stratification for breath control play, the agenda boasted.
(What is trust? Can something so breakable be considered real? A fallacy, surely, one given and taken in the same breath. It is of no permanence. It has no solid shape, no form. It, like Christmas, does not exist without belief. There is no commercial presence for faith in another human being, and does that invalidate it entirely? What use are gods without belief? What use is trust, when it is so fine a thread that it can snap without warning? Or is delicacy beauty, and is beauty delicacy? Is the fine thread more cherished than the strong rope?)
There was nothing sexual about it. Nothing sensual. Nothing beautiful about the blue plastic chair or the girl sitting in it, her hands clutched tight to the sides and a dozen observers, her own greek choir. The man behind her was old enough to be her father, and Sera tipped her head back and looked at him with doe eyes and maelstroms.
His hands covered her nose. His hands covered her mouth. His fingers found her throat. She gasped.
That night - beneath cool white linen, heavy and chaffing against skin gone sore with emotions too excruciating for flesh to contain - her fingers slid between her thighs. She moaned. She could almost hear the rushing water, the slap of waves on sand, and the sound of struggles in the next room.
She slept.