Short Story: "Fanfiction"
Dec. 23rd, 2019 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deemoyzaWhen the end arrives, it does so far too soon for her. There is too much left to be said and done, too many lives left unexamined, too much of the world left unexplored, beyond the small window that was offered her. When the end arrives, accented with flourishes befitting the conclusion of an epic, it gives her no sense of closure. Only restlessness.
Like having a taste of a banquet, before being barred from the hall.
She carries the end with her for days, for months, for years – turning it over in her mind all the while, wishing she could go back to the beginning, wishing she could tear it down and go further. It is very much like grief, she realizes; grief on a small, trivial scale, but grief nonetheless.
Her heart aches for those she left behind. Her soul longs for stories left untold. Her mind races with possibilities, with words left unspoken, unwritten; with lore and conflicts gone unrecorded; with confessions not whispered, warm touches not shared.
Pasts and futures and what-ifs. Legends and relationships and a whole wide world to contain them all.
A world larger than her mind, she hopes, for her mind has grown so full of ideas, of characters and concepts and circumstances, that she feels she will not be able to hold them in much longer.
And she can't. They dribble out, bit by bit, onto the margins of notebooks, onto computer screens, onto the backs of old receipts. Funny, naughty, introspective, tragic – all cathartic. Little reunions with people who never were, but who feel as familiar as friends. Little discoveries in a world that can never be, but is no less real for it.
She takes these driblets, these sketches, these drops of new life, and she lays them over the flourishes of the end, building onto the frame of the story, building upon the bones of the world, sculpting, forming, finding satisfaction in the task.
Finding herself.
A fresh sheet of paper, a blank computer document, a battered notepad. A sharpened pencil, a chewed-up pen, a blinking cursor. An end that came too soon for her.
My end. Your end. Their end.
Her beginning.
Like having a taste of a banquet, before being barred from the hall.
She carries the end with her for days, for months, for years – turning it over in her mind all the while, wishing she could go back to the beginning, wishing she could tear it down and go further. It is very much like grief, she realizes; grief on a small, trivial scale, but grief nonetheless.
Her heart aches for those she left behind. Her soul longs for stories left untold. Her mind races with possibilities, with words left unspoken, unwritten; with lore and conflicts gone unrecorded; with confessions not whispered, warm touches not shared.
Pasts and futures and what-ifs. Legends and relationships and a whole wide world to contain them all.
A world larger than her mind, she hopes, for her mind has grown so full of ideas, of characters and concepts and circumstances, that she feels she will not be able to hold them in much longer.
And she can't. They dribble out, bit by bit, onto the margins of notebooks, onto computer screens, onto the backs of old receipts. Funny, naughty, introspective, tragic – all cathartic. Little reunions with people who never were, but who feel as familiar as friends. Little discoveries in a world that can never be, but is no less real for it.
She takes these driblets, these sketches, these drops of new life, and she lays them over the flourishes of the end, building onto the frame of the story, building upon the bones of the world, sculpting, forming, finding satisfaction in the task.
Finding herself.
A fresh sheet of paper, a blank computer document, a battered notepad. A sharpened pencil, a chewed-up pen, a blinking cursor. An end that came too soon for her.
My end. Your end. Their end.
Her beginning.
