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A Quiet Isolation |
| Written by Frances | |
| Sunday, 04 May 2008 | |
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Share it:      For years Constance had sat, as she did now on the cold hard surface of this wooden stool. Every year in the cold December months she sat for her school portrait, uniform clean and neatly pressed only on this one day of the year. The wisps of hair that constantly shielded her face were carefully pulled back and held with pins. She felt exposed. She felt the eyes of the other girls in her year level, their youthful stares studying the face of a girl they barely new.
Constance was quiet, to say the least. In class discussions, she held her head down; ashamed of any opinions she thought to share. Many of the other girls would have questioned to themselves and each other why this girl never spoke, but Constance's presence was scarcely noticed. She was glad though, sharing her past, and the secrets it held was to re-live the experience, confronting memories that haunted her.
She remembered the day her life had changed. She was eight, her sister, Hope, was six. She remembered taking the time to wash her feet and creating a game of making it into the house without getting them muddy again. As she leapt determinedly from stepping-stone to stepping-stone her sister's cackling giggle behind her interrupted her own erratic breathing, exhausted and still gasping hard, she to burst into a fit of laughter as she turned to face the girl that frolicked towards her. The winds picked up and circled the pair like a pack of wolves, violent mouths snapping at the ends of her skirt which blew up wildly around her. The ferocity of the howling wolves sending her thick mane of curls into a darting panic, forcing the locks to scurry out in front of her face. The innocent laughter of the daughters surrendered to the cries of the wind that bound them, the sunshine they had worshipped had deserted them now, something had changed and it had become a dark day.
A familiar giggle broke her thoughts and she looked up from her dreaming state. All the girls standing in their snake-like lines which coiled themselves around the eating hall were turned towards her. With darting mud brown eyes she scanned the lines searching for the source of that laugh. Their eyes met, identical eyes, with heavy lids and almost invisible lashes. No comfort was exchanged between the glance. Sick of waiting the photographer captured the shot. She wasn't smiling, she wasn't even looking at the camera, but there she was, her face, frozen onto film forever. Her cheeks flushed crimson and she rose slowly from the seat.
In the quiet isolation of the library she indulged herself in another book. The words on the page forming a world around her, a private world, an escape. She fought the tears that came like fire. The familiar burning sensation from behind her closed eye-lids carried her back. She was eight again, cradled in the arms of her father's favourite chair. Its fine smooth leather in a deep shade of green swallowed her child-sized body so that none of her limbs disturbed the stiff air around it. Grief consumed the room. Hope was slumped lifeless in a matching chair across the elaborate living room staring out of the window across the green fields that stretched out under the crying sky. It was a Sunday afternoon; she and her sister had been playing in those fields, like they always did, laughing and playing imaginary roles of princesses and fairies until unexpected bad weather invaded the sky and they had been forced into the safety of their house. Looking down she thumbed at the tare in the hem of her skirt, it was a fresh wound to the old material, she had worried when it first happened what her mother would say, if she would yell, whether she would be given biscuits after tea. The worries of her eight-year old mind bemused her; she was many years older now than she was a few hours ago.
In the large empty halls of the old school her footsteps echoed as she made her way back to the dorms. The lighting was dim, her path only illuminated by the strong lights coming from the room at the end of the corridor. An ironic metaphor she thought to herself, her reader's imagination thinking of her father. She pictured him, standing tall behind his desk in his study, wearing a fine , clean suit, as he always had, and wondered whether, as he eased the top draw out from its safety and removed the cold black weapon with his steady decided hands, if he himself had seen a warming light at the end of a tunnel. Did it, she longed to ask him, tempt him with such hope that there was not even a simmer of reconsideration?
Back in the bare room confining her, at the cheap wooden desk that was scarred by the many carvings of girls before her, she pulled out a blank sheet of paper and began to write. At first she approached the letter cautiously, delicately lacing the words across the page as if it were fragile, but her mind began to flood, the pen held in her hand soon taken prisoner by the speed and demand of its task. Her thoughts surged themselves out of her as if they had been bursting to do so for the past seven years. She expressed her fears, scared to love, scared to trust, scared to be deserted. She expressed her regrets, her distance to the family, the challenges of opening up to people, the thoughts of anger towards her father for his cowardly exit from the world, her own self-blame for his decision. The burning returned to her eyes, she did not fight the tears, she embraced this escape of emotion as it fell from her face to the page. She wrote until she felt completely exhausted of everything she had to say. At the bottom of the letter she signed, ‘with much love, your sister'.
In the quiet of the night she slid the letter under the door of the room she had never visited, knowing that tomorrow her sister would read all of the words that had been imprinted into her soul for so many years. She felt alive, she felt brave, she wanted to have her school photograph taken again, released of her chains she was finally free to smile. Copyright 2008 Frances |
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