Signs of Life

She sees the world in black and white, with no colours. Feelings come to her slowly, or not at all, but mostly she just feels like she is living under a sky in perpetual threat of rain, and the fear of not being able to find shelter in time. In her world there is no asylum, no one to trust and none of the ships have safe harbours. Despite all this, she is not afraid of getting hurt; she lives life in total abandon, like a leaf fallen from a tree, constantly drifting, borne along the current of a merciless wind. Or is it because she is too afraid of getting hurt? Maybe she thinks that hiding behind a facade of apathy will lead others to accept her because she has nothing to lose. There is something about her twisted sense of logic that I understand, but the strands are so tangled that there is no way it could have ever been logical to begin with. Pretty soon, there will be no sign of life behind her facade at all, and I am scared that I will not be able to save her from this process of self-decay.

It is strange, that after so long, she could still be waiting for that one call to make her life better. The strange irony is that it will not make her life better; she is better off where she is now, isolated from him and the unsettling feeling he brings with him whenever they meet. She is comfortable around him, she feels sick around him, she is attracted to him, and yet she is repulsed by him. When he touched her, it felt pleasant, but unsettling. It felt good, but it also felt wrong, like she is detached from herself and watching herself as an actress would through a silver screen playing just one role of many that could be.

She is not so much attracted to him but the idea of him. She knows that this idea is flawed, unattainable, but she holds onto it anyway. In a world of black and white, romance is born a pink flower in a flowerbed of grey. The sky dropping grey tears is its only source of nourishment, but overtime, the pedals are eroded into a darker, more dangerous red. There is lust in there, but no love. It is a disengaging concept born from cynics. She was born a romantic, meant to walk in a world of sunshine and meadows ever green and lush, but she lives as a cynic.

I keep telling her that she can do better, that what she would have gotten would not have been what she wanted for herself anyway. She does not believe me. She has failed too many times to be able to continue hoping that there is something better out there to strive for. I do not want to lose her, but there she is, slipping away from me.

She needs a reason, a belief bigger and stronger than herself that she can live for or else she will just stagnate. She drifts between the past and the future; dwelling on the past, worrying about the future, that she completely ignores the present. She is fully engaged, and yet completely disengaged. She thinks too much, and yet she does not think at all. To her, life is just one long, run-on sentence full of contradictions.

I want to save her, tell her that she is beautiful, that life is worth living for, for herself, not just for a cause or for somebody else. Why is it that the truth is always the hardest to take?