Half Off the Ground

Prologue

Life is a question of the survival of the fittest. We claw our way to the top, tearing ourselves apart for some of that sunlight, and find ourselves, souls borne naked, at the top. Maybe we take a look around, eyes new to the brilliance of that pristine life, and maybe we realize in ourselves that rebellious fear.

Maybe we are alone.

This is at first oblivious to our sights, the freshness taking our breaths away and distracting. Our hearts are still racing from the battle just won, the sweat still clinging to our last remaining animal instincts. We live vicariously through those we have unknowingly betrayed, but day by day the boredom dawns.

We too, separate from them, are, in ourselves, alive.

Unbeknownst to us, a seed planted has matured and grown. It begins to shade our judgment and steal our light. Warmth becomes indifferent, the bright colors faded grey, until the day we find them: our half, our only, our…other.

But we find, much to humanity’s dismay that we hate them despite that knowledge – or rather, because of it. They reveal to us an undistorted reflection of ourselves: the naked, disgusting creature that we have become, stripped of the very culture that drove us to this extinction of our self.

A/N: a new novel started for the summer. "Beauty Mine" had become far too depressing for me, and yet remained very enticing. I took it, reshaped it, and added some different focuses. Inspired by Goethe and his "eternal feminine," de Beauvoir and her "transcendence," Vygotsky and his "self," and the title I give credit to my mistaken interpretation of Brandy's "Almost Doesn't Count."