Letters of a Prophecy

One

It had been a horrible morning. The fake, aromatic fog had descended and settled in enigmatic dew, seething with fake country freshness. I had arrived early at school that morning, settling in the library to pleasantly disturb the faeries and princes and unicorns there.

The library at my school was small yet vividly well stocked with books of poetry, which at all times, I was favoured to devour. At the present time, I was sucking the flesh out of a book of metaphysical poetry. I had always admired the works of John Donne, and John Keats. Their work seemed to be a device of transportation, many metaphors and similes and caesura adding to the effect of seething comparisons. I had learned that to enjoy the solitude of the book best, it should be red in the silence of eerie madness, so unlike the static of real life.

As often before, I easily acquired thoughts of barricading myself there, letting myself be pushed into an alternate reality as easily as turning a doorknob. So I stayed there, in the tiny library, at the tiny desk between the tiny rows of books, in the tiny seat. Yes, I could let myself be free for once there, flowing like liquid into a glass bowl. I always found that outside of the solitude of words and lines and pages, life is suffocating. The air squeezes like a vice, just waiting for a tiny bit of ooze to escape an eyeball vexed. Then, it could scream in satisfaction. I always seemed to sense the purple haze sweltering over a life, knowing when it was about to fade. This was my fate.

Throughout my stay in the library, I had endured and ignored the pathetic pleas of existence from many lines, just begging me to free the characters from the fictional prison in which they were entrapped. I could hear the others in the library moaning, figuring that they too heard the grunts as one after another, faeries dotted the floor, falling out of their cages. Begging attention from the dolls and muses and magical creatures, I just wriggled down further in my seat, pulling down my regulatory burgundy jumper. I felt the fibres digging at my skin as if they were spiders covering my entire being.

The others in the library sat screaming in a corner, flinging attention from the teachers dressed in their usual grey skirts and burgundy cardigans. As I watched them, I could not help but think of my poor Aunt, lain in between white hospital sheets in a white hospital room in a white hospital building. I could see her tummy reflected in the lily white gown, dotted with little dances of ducks and lily ponds to hide the reds and blacks and blues.

I thought that it must be the worst thing in the world.