Saturday, August 7, 2010

Obsidian

I started talking to myself at the age of five. I wasn't very interesting at the time.


Some people had friends, a few of them imaginary, but I guess I'm more of the loner type. Rather than connect, I separated. I spoke to myself through my toys, my action figures, and my dolls. Yes, I played with dolls. Those heroes needed girls to talk to, and steal from, and give extra treats, didn't they? It would be a weird little world where a boy couldn't find a girl to talk to.


My other side was formless, then. He wasn't very fun. He didn't understand my games, didn't understand any of them really. The soldiers game. The school game. The parents game, and especially the sister game. He would look at her for hours...why did she exist, he pondered, and why was she entitled to our things? I argued with him constantly. My parents were worried.


After they were satisfied, years had passed and I'd learned to talk more quietly. The games had turned into dramas, growing into the teen fantasies and epics that turn lives and hearts around. The most passionate love stories of ages past were about teens, the displaced children of a modern world and raging young adults of a lost past. Would someone twenty-something and too cool to care have made a proper Romeo? I walked upon my stage those years, and my whispering partner frowned in disapproval. His eyes were blue now. He had my mother's eyes, the sort of eyes she had when she was trying to understand something she found ugly, but possibly a sign of some hidden potential for genius.


I grew and the daggers and poisons and breath-soaked mirrors came and went, and so had I. I was adult now, and capable of saying adult things. I was wholly formed and volatile within, a volcano bursting...onto an open sea. I was forming a cool and stable center while I burned away, pushing that tide of possibility further out. It's what I did. It's what we all do. We become. And so he became...he formed. Took on a shape, distant and abstract but distinct. Raven feathers. The glint of silver, reflecting those same blue eyes. I was cooling and forming. He was fully formed and already very cold.


He stayed with the heat, while I expanded. I lost my geothermal drive. He never warmed a degree and never followed. I took the wrong paths and he didn't laugh, but his eyes did. He knew better. He would have warned me. Adults don't listen to voices anymore, though, do they?


I buried him. I have a new imaginary friend now. He goes to offices and drinks coffee. The rest of my mes wait in obsidian for him to realize what he's lost.


It cracks sharp. It bleeds.

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