This is a story I have worked on/been tweaking for a while. It's just a character sketch, or the inner thoughts and workings of a character (in this case a teenage girl), but I am rather proud of it....
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Only the great heroes are remembered throughout time. There’s no way around it: either you’re famous forever or you’re one of the masses, maybe remembered for a few generations before you fade to the backdrop. Perhaps some young descendant may choose to research you for some school project, but only if you did something interesting. After all, who wants to hear about boring old Sally who spent the last of her days caring for twenty cats when you can brag about Gambling Gary, the man who put all of his money on stakes and won it all? Not that I disagree – I’m happy being some average Jo who gets that 15 minutes of fame and then that’s it. Honest. If there was a spotlight I’d be on the very rim of it, edging backwards. No, this world is just too cruel on their stars to want to have that sort of fame. No privacy? Nuh uh! No, I like my privacy, my anonymous status just fine. Well, maybe the once-in-a-while stage light wouldn’t be so bad, but for the rest of my life? No.

I suppose one of the drives for being famous is recognition, the feeling that you have a place in the world, the feeling that you’re worth something. But I don’t need this world for that. In my head, I can go for hours, from mere servant girl to the lost princess everyone held their breath for. People care for me there, care about me and who I am and what I want and…. I’ve gotten off topic, haven’t I? I tend to wander often. And not only in the mental sense.

Mom always nagged at me to watch where I was going. I’d be thinking about a story, a person, or just thinking when I’d bump into somebody, something, and make a fool out of myself. By now I just laugh it off, but bruises and scrapes stay with you no matter how you react to the situation. I can’t help it, not really. My mind is this huge library, each book a story created from my wild imagination. When you’ve got millions of worlds and people just waiting for you, it’s hard to focus on reality. Believe me, I’ve tried, but it is no easy task. My parents always worried about me when I was younger. While my classmates had play-dates and sports games on the weekends, I was perfectly content to spend the day in my PJs on the computer, reading or writing stories.

But who am I? Well, I’ll pretend you actually want to know, and since no one can read my mind-journal, no one can laugh at my sorry excuse of explaining my life. I’m (name later). I’m 16, though I can pretend I’m 18 and get away with it. Since I was young, I’ve always had a huge imagination. In the car after preschool I would make my mom mimic Disney movie voices, and I would make a story. I never needed toys – just my mind. Of course, when your mind holds so many delicious stories, worlds even, why bother trying to squeeze yourself into the stereotype to be accepted in the real world? Not that I’m a loner or anything. I mean, I can walk by just about any group of kids and we’ll exchange hellos and all that. I have a good reputation as a nice kid, so I don’t get much dirt about spacing out a lot. Or at least, I don’t hear it.

But I’m babbling again. I always do that. At least in my mind, I do. I suppose that’s what gets me so distracted in the first place, but distractions are quite useful replacements for boredom. I’d rather be known as the spacey kid who’s nice enough than the ADD kid who’s pure annoying. But that’s not politically correct, is it? Should I say I’d rather not be a kid who has a short attention span and cannot help getting bored? And what if I meant what I said, that I don’t want to have ADD. Or now is it ADHD? And since when did anyone want to have ADHD? So if being politically correct means trying to talk about a person dubbed ‘unfortunate’ by society in a kind way, why is the world so cruel to the minorities anyway? Think of Nathan, some kid with ADHD who’s yelled at all the time because his leg keeps bouncing but nothing he does can stop it. And…

Right. See what I mean? There’s one more person, one more character to add to the list, one more personality to file into the library. And maybe on a rainy Sunday, or even a sunny Sunday, I’ll pull him out and see my world through his eyes, and then my leg will bounce and so many ideas will whiz through my mind while the world crawls by in slow motion. And I’ll stay in my room so no one sees me, so no one finds me out. Just like always.

It’s funny, when you think about it, how we all mindlessly fall into schedules. Mindless habits. After the first few tries at something new, it either sticks or it doesn’t. Our phone rang for ten play date offers before the habit changed. Three girls from school go down to the street corner after school and get three warm bagels every day. The 24 bus stops by Jim’s Mail Room with the blue flamingo and picks up 11 giggling girls, winding down to the Ballet Centre every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Lunch tables don’t need name tags or labels – only we see them anyways. Every Wednesday is Spaghetti Special with two lopsided meatballs and a chocolate chip cookie. Habit.

I wonder what would happen if chaos took over. Like after a huge war. Not the neat, symbolic chaos like after-war literature, but pure, true chaos. The kind of chaos like the dream, that dream where the colors are all wrong and you’re running on the underside of clouds and the fish whip by in a purple breeze. When things don’t do what they are expected to do, so you can never form impressions or stereotypes because no one does anything the same way twice. And if you want chocolate ice cream but your friend wants vanilla the ice cream maker gives you a bubblegum cone to share; only both think you got what you wanted because you don’t know what it is. That might be nice, but no mind can scientifically handle that pure chaos. Maybe kids do. I think for kids, those little ones who stare at the world wide-eyed and wild, awestruck and curious, for them that’s chaos right there. You know hungry and cold and itchy and happy and sad and all these hu-normous feelings swarming over you like that big cold wet thing and all you can do is make more wet things that are warm and tickle your cheeks. That’s chaos.

Sometimes, that craziness sinks into my mind and I have to sit down and reorganize everything all over again. The books slide back onto dusty shelves and a new idea, a new world, gets rediscovered. Spring cleaning in an entropic way. Huh, physics.

But physics brings me out of the warm folds of my mind, and back into reality. Physics, with buoyancy and lambda and velocity. Only the concepts are taught because we don’t have enough math skills for real physics, and we have to go back later and retake the course with actual formula and proofs and all those strange, alien things. Personally, physics and math can disappear for all I care – it’s naught but letters and numbers jumbled into strings of thoughts, like that string theory Mr. Whazhisname told us about. You’ve got Suzy with three balls and Benny with two, but what colors are they? Are they big, small, flat, hard, or soft? Did Suzy steal one from Benny ‘cause she got jealous? How did they get the ball in the first place? Math gets so boring, like the details get sucked out and all that’s left are bones.

But English, English is something different entirely. It’s…well, it’s fun. People do things, say things, and hint subtly with colors and weather and dialogue. They imply, intrude, infer. Sometimes, late at night, the words slid off the page, swirling round my head like a faint breeze, carrying whispers of foreshadowing.

Labels: story

~*~*~*~ the amethyst has risen ~*~*~*~