All right, it's rare for me to share writing among a group of strangers, as I'm extremely paranoid about having any of my works plagiarized. However, after seeing several comments from well-meaning posters here that share the same passion for writing as I, I couldn't help but feel compelled to showcase a little something that I've had for a while. I've written this when I was sixteen, actually (I'm now seventeen). Also, if this happens to be plagiarized, please notify me as soon as possible.
All right, so without further adieu...here it is.
Visions of Kara
- Heather Hazy -
.:* Prologue *:.
.•:*¨`*:•.:*¨`*:•. .•:*¨`*:•.•:*¨`*:•.•:*¨`*:•.
Man-eating orchids forgive no one just yet
Cut myself on angel hair and baby’s breath
Broken hymen of your highness I’m left black
Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back
:: Heart-Shaped Box ::
- Nirvana -
Kara remembered that when she first arrived into the world and escaped from the warm sanctuary of the womb, she saw the solemn faces of doctors and nurses. The quicksilver eyes of blended angels whispered the secretive embodiment of romance in a phantasm of ghostly feathers, deathless mementos that floated gently to the ground like downy snow. They stared down at her with tragically beautiful eyes, eyes that could see everything in the whole universe until the entire galaxy closes in to itself and the last star exploded into the remnants of a spinning cinder. Kara stared back at the angels with an equally somber expression, her forest-green eyes reflecting the supernatural light that glowed from theirs. Their ethereal, otherworldly eyes stared at her, melancholy drowning pools of light that magnetized her towards their depths. Her forest-green eyes stared with a silent somberness, and appeared thoughtful as well, almost as if she knew that she was fatherless to the world, fearless eyes that enraptured and projected her internal reflection out for everybody to see. Eyes that had nothing to hide. Then, her sense of self hovered above and in this place, in another time and dimension, perhaps something deep-laden in her memories through a subconscious need or desire, something that called to her, beckoned her. Her mother sprawled against a hospital bed, the profile of her bare shoulders resembling the stubs of angel wings, her hair an aureole of brown locks hovering above the white pillow in delicate wisps. The heart monitor beside her depicted crazed zigzag lines etching themselves on a digital screen as a soft, mechanical beep marks their progress. Kara could hear the cacophonous sound of heartbeats pounding in her head like something heard in a delirium, expanding, expanding until the otherworldly lights consumed her vision and the world spiraled out of control.
She wasn’t afraid, nor did she cry. Through an innate sense, Kara knew in a wordless way that she was different, and the first questions she asked the angels were ‘Why am I different?’ or ‘What is the meaning of this?’. All around, through a sense of disconnection, she sensed an electrical, underlying tension in the hospital room. Everyone thought that something was wrong, especially with her being born premature. They thought that perhaps she was a stillborn. Even though a film of afterbirth clouded her eyes, they still moved unblinkingly with vigor and life, and held a healthy fascination for everything around her. The metallic scent of the hospital lingered into her nostrils as the harsh illumination from the overhead lights above her glanced off metal surfaces at unreal angles through her dilated pupils, and the looming presence of a doctor’s face peered into her eyes, seeking to penetrate. Kara remembered that much, at least. As for the rest, she couldn’t be too sure. For some reason, she remembered seeing the angels as the first breeze swept over her bare, vulnerable body. She didn’t know how she remembered something like that with such clarity, or how she knew with perfect conviction the angels were real. All she knew was that they were there, and that was the only thing that mattered. Nobody else knew about the angels except her; it was her own secret. At first, Kara thought that the angels were normal, something that everybody else could see. However, when she told her mother about them, her face had taken an ashen-white much like bleached bone as she held Kara’s head between both hands in a steel-vice grip before murmuring in a fierce undertone that they weren’t real and they never were. Pressing even closer to her daughter’s whitened face, an eerie intensity of madness reflected in the twin mirrors of her eyes as her mother said in a clipped tone to never mention them again.
From that time on, Kara never spoke to her mother about the angels, nor did she even mention the taboo word in her mother’s presence. The prospect of angels was something that frightened her mother; for what reason, Kara didn’t know the answer. However, Kara saw the angels again when she was seven years old, their solemn, quicksilver eyes stared at her with such a sad and fierce intensity that seared through her entire being. Kara stared back at them with an equally intense expression, green oculars never straying from the celestial beings that somehow transcended into the human realm. The angels were tragically beautiful, the remnants of tainted pasts and the purest sorrow. Somehow, they reminded Kara of her mother; lovely and tragic. Their eyes spoke volumes in an empty world, and all of a sudden, everything transitioned from black and white to technicolor reality in front of her eyes, flickering like a television screen in a wavering world of profound hues that coalesced into one another like a watercolor painting, like a child crying on her mother’s shoulder and she stood disoriented, though the space between her and the angels remained still, everything around them spiraled at crazed angles until Kara lost her sense of self. Every time their presence was revealed, a gentle ache would form in Kara’s throat like a sad, lovely dream she had woken out of; she didn’t know why, but in a wordless way she couldn’t express, there was a sense of longing and heartache.
It was simple to indulge in this parallel world that Kara often experienced, slipping between the membranous barrier separating sanity from insanity. The laws of physics were suspended, a surreal landscape of psychedelic proportions. Time was meaningless, meandering in a stray pool of gravity and black holes that shifted it forwards or backwards in time, perhaps in yawning circular rings of consciousness or causing lapses between events now and then. Mirrored in a strange nexus between the worlds, Kara could sometimes drift away into this other world, vaguely noticing the world that she came from at a distant viewpoint; there, she could see everything in this perfect isolation, and she is a god drifted among the universe, perhaps seeing as the angels could see, the world miniaturized like a delicate snow globe containing everything within its confinements, the stars and planets and moons revolving together into an impressionistic smear, beautiful and ethereal. Vaguely, Kara would begin to wonder if anybody else saw what she saw. As she grew up, she came to the conclusion that perhaps those who were insane, dying, or perhaps dead, could see glimpses of this greater reality behind the veil of the world that is perceived as true. It chilled her as she came to a lucid realization of the world, especially at such a young age; she was either a sane person in a rather insane (or deluded) world, or perhaps she didn’t exist in such a world at all, and was only a mere projection from one world into the next. Kara had no explanation for it, though through an innate sense, she was convinced this revelation was true.
Meanwhile, she would watch everything else as though she stood within the eye of a tornado while everything progressed on in its continual orbit while she remained still, secluded in a weightless vacuum where the gravity of all worlds hovered above her. As inescapable as the earth revolves around the sun, new generations come forth, adapting and changing to the influence of time as Kara sees all of this from a detached viewpoint and she knows that she’ll have to go on as they do. In her dreams, in the labyrinth halls of kaleidoscope shards and hallucinatory mirrors, Kara would see the angels again, except she knew that what she wasn’t experiencing dreams, she was really crossing into the other realm, the other world, the parallel dimension that inter-connects with her known reality, yet both are unaware of the other’s existence. Kara vaguely remembered transcending both worlds at once, and the enormous gap between them awed her as a transition in consciousness took place, hovering upon a brink. What surprised her was the fact that it was as easy as letting go; almost like stepping off the parapet of a building and bracing yourself for the rollercoaster plunge into empty space. It was frightening, even after so many times of crossing over this brink. Even though she could expect the free-fall from one dimension to another, the sense of disconnection from her body still daunted her. However, in some point of time, people could cross over this void in increments, creating a series of punctures within the barrier in their wake until an opening is finally revealed, where there is lucid realization, haunting, almost omniscient in its discovery.
After all, seeing through the eyes of God or angels didn’t come without a price.
24 Mar 2007, 8:52 am
