AN: #3: Light, from my original fiction 100. The title is Italian for "the arrangement of light and dark."

This is a really, really person story... it's almost autobiographical, although there are a few events I changed (all of the emotion, though, is true). I've been feeling a desperate need to get the feelings of the last twenty hours or so off my chest. I wanted to draw, but drawings take too long. This took about an hour. I've still got a thousand things churning around in my head, but this helped.

You'll notice there are no names and very few genders. That was purpouseful.

...I can't decide if this is way emo or one of the best things I've ever written. That tends to happen a lot.

Once, there was a girl. At some point, she was in love- or at least something very like it- and there was light. It was a light that shimmered whenever the other spoke, spilling into corners and cracks and exposing her heart in a way she would never manage again. But neither of them recognized the light. There were silences, awkward and aching and full of a something that she felt with all of her but the other only sensed. They were young, and it was strange, so the two of them just avoided it and focused their attention on different, silly things, like a favorite song or a new hat.

And then- as happens- the pair grew apart, and she was left alone. There was no light. There were feeble sparks that she refused to acknowledge until after they could have helped, and the glint of a boy's smile that she tried to hold on to, but there was no real light. She crawled into bed and sobbed until she couldn't breathe, feeling empty and meaningless- with the lights turned off. Fake light would have been more than she could bear.

Her parents told her off for her sinking grades, and she retreated into her room, turning the lights out so she could cry again. All her parents saw was a bad report card. She saw an empty future. How was she to live without light? How was she to find her way? These questions haunted her almost as much as the other's hair in the sunlight.

She never cried in public, and she never told anyone that there was no light in her life anymore. She said to herself she was being stupid. She tried to make her own light. She wondered when she'd ever get used to the darkness and the ache in her heart.

Yet somehow, life refused to stop. It dragged her, kicking and screaming, through the rest of the year, and she thought she would finally find relief in the summer holidays… but all she discovered was a fresh hell. She wanted to forget. She got reminders instead: reminders of that light, of her feelings of worthlessness, of the shallow connections with her new friends.

The light was the worst. The light found the holes in her she had tried so hard to cover up and refused to let them heal.

And then something very strange happened. The girl got angry. She shoved the light away and huddled in the darkness. She could not embrace it, but she could accept it. She could let her eyes adjust, and she would find a way to live. The girl was tired of feeling useless and pointless.

Instead, she decided to feel nothing at all.

She buried herself in her schoolwork to make up for last year's slips. She was no valedictorian, but she stopped looking up whenever she saw that light, unless it was between two of her friends. Then she would smile, and the guise would slip, just for a moment. She would never admit out loud how much she wanted to see that light again- but from a distance, on the outside, it was safe.

She still felt unacknowledged, unnecessary- like a waste of space. She would glance at herself in the mirror, and the darkness- which usually didn't hurt anymore- burned. But she refused to let it take over. She considered herself strong because she pushed away from distractions and tried to rise above.

That was how she found a little light again. She saw it one night when her closest new-but-not-really friend lay in her arms, trapped in her own small patch of darkness, and she realized that the sparks of her friends laying around her were the only reasons she was still alive. They gave her light. It was not blinding (obviously, or she would have noticed before) but it lifted the darkness a little bit, just enough to reflect off their eyes and make her realize that she didn't have to pretend quite so much. At least, not about knowing what it was like to lose.

Life still did not stop, but she was a passive passenger now, occasionally trying to grab hold of a moment and spread its subtle glow around, but not protesting anymore. She had too much to think about.

Then, when she did not expect it, there was a boy. He was someone she had known by name and sight and sense of humor since the year before, but never someone she had been close with. They had a class together that was interesting in theory but boring in practice. And she discovered something very strange: she liked him, without pretense or agenda. She didn't have to grasp at splinters; she found herself laughing at things he'd said hours later when they popped into her head in the middle of class.

And there was light. For the first time in so long, there was real light. There were still hidden corners and cracks and tears that the light didn't touch- it wasn't nearly as bright as she remembered, but after all, that light had taken a long time- but it was nice. There were awkward moments- moments when the silence would stretch between them and smirk at her (as if she didn't already know what an ass she was making of herself to get close to that light)- but mostly there was light. A different kind, maybe, something she had never seen- never felt- before, but for the first time in so long, she could see again.

Of course, there was darkness along with the light. There were moments she was sure that the awkwardness was foretelling another ending, and she told herself she musn't get used to it. Good things never lasted, not for her.

…Though, was it really a sin to want them to? To think that she deserved a little light after all that emptiness?

No. And so she decided- in much the same kind of mood as when she had tried to get used to the darkness- that she would enjoy it as long as she could before it shattered. And there was no doubt in her mind that it would.

Time went by- life still dragged her along, turning a deaf ear to her inner struggle- and nothing happened (only reinforcing what she was sure she already knew). She told herself that maybe she'd do something about it next year- he'd be graduating, after all, and she'd probably never see him again after that, so what was the risk? Even if she messed it all up, she would still have those few moments to show her way, and she was sure they would not leave her raw and hollow like the passage of the last light.

But then she discovered something. Those pauses, that awkwardness, that shy edge to their smiles- they were because the two of them shared the light. It was something that she simply could not believe- at least, not until a moment that both of them agreed was rather anticlimactic. But instead of being hollow inside, she was filled to the brim with a thousand things she hadn't allowed herself to feel in so long… and it was beautiful.

Once, there was light. Once, there was darkness. Now there was a curious mixture of both, and she didn't quite know what to do with herself… but she was sure she'd figure it out.