“Her Pale Blue Eyes”

A short story / fictional narrative

    I, Daniel Kayes, am writing this as a distant confession, not as retribution for my sins.

It was not the things they did that hurt her.  The teasing, the harassment, the subjugation of her self worth.  I could see in her pale blue eyes that she understood and felt pity for the distant souls that floated about her, disconnected.  She refracted her sadness and turned it into the never ending compassion that ultimately tore her.  Even in early childhood her slender, pale hands never ceased to reach out to those who dared to hurt her, desperate to make the connections that might save them.  But she could not save herself.  This world was not created for the pure.  It takes a darkened heart to survive among the human condition and, even to this day, I believe it was this realization that shattered her own.

    No, it was the things they failed to do that broke her.  The things we failed to see, let alone understand.  I always have made a point of never idealizing another being, but Sabine was as close to a perfect creature as nature could ever hope to create.

    I suppose my first fault was my distance.  As I have stated, she was wondrous, but her grace and composure intimidated me.  There were days that I would glance at her from across the cramped lunchroom of our local public school. Other days I would watch her daydream as she stared into they greying streets outside of her favorite cafe (well, the only cafe in our tiny hometown).  We had been close in childhood, when those soft white hands of hers had found their first grip on my soul, but, like my peers, I feared the silent look upon her face.  I came to find her lack of anger obscure and I was compelled to irrational fear.  Our fear, my own and that of my peers, I believe, is what killed her.

    I should have known how she really felt beneath the cool facade.  I, however, had one connection to her though which I was not forced to fall into the compelling solitude of those cool, crystal eyes.  We still dared to speak to one another, but only through the socially impersonal medium known as Facebook.  Perhaps it was once a week that we spoke, but I never was able to learn more of the young adult Sabine than her prefered books and a couple favored movies.  At night, as I tried to fall asleep, I would stare at the plaster ceiling of my room and picture the past we shared together.  

In the days when she lived down the street we would play in the dirt and wade in the river that flowed through our town.  We would tell each other secrets that others were to never know, even to the day it all ended.  She feared people, I remember, my poor Sabine.  Upon her returning home, her mother would often shout at her for dirtying her dress and roughly tug her into the house, barely noticing me standing there or the distant look that gradually became more apparent on Sabine’s face as she aged.  It took me until the very end to notice that it was in those years that her aspirations faded away as she was slowly swallowed by her own self-doubt.  She grew more isolated as the days turned into years and there reached a day that I could no longer bring myself to be close to her.

    I should have told someone, did something when I discovered the hidden secrets within her Facebook profile, this public form of her private life.  I scrolled through her info page, late one night as I secretly loathed my cowardice.  It was a single link that I found under the “personal website” listing.  I clicked it.

    I was redirected to a site, simple in design but quite professional in appearance.  I quickly realized that the link formed between this page and her Facebook profile had been a mistake, most likely made years ago when the account had first been created.  There they lay, the dark art of her soul.  The earliest sketches in her gallery were of angels and flowers that were quite cherubic and serene in appearance.  However, as I scrolled to her more recent works, I noticed how things turned noticeably macabre.  The angels cried, and then bled.  The flower wilted and disintegrated into piles of lonely ashes.  There were eyes, her own eyes, that were sketched to reflect the loneliness she felt in her mind.  A mannequin strung up by wires like a marionette, frighteningly harlequinesque in appearance.  To this day, I still shudder when I think of its grimacing face.

    Suddenly, I understood.  The pain she felt that no one bothered to notice.  She was the angels, the flowers.  She was the one sodden in tears and melting into ash.  My head spun as I contemplated the meaning of it all.  For the first time, Sabine occurred to me not as a mystical creature to be feared and awed, but as a human being.  I knew I had not been the first to click that link, and I knew I would certainly not be the last, especially after her death.

    Sabine died on a blustery winter day in mid-February; she had just turned eighteen years old.  She was not in school for two days which, surprisingly, did not initially alarm me.  I was told of her death the following morning by a distant friend of mine who had overheard a group of teachers softly muttering amongst themselves.  Once again, my connections to her were regrettably impersonal.  Her light, however, was not extinguished in the way most people would expect from seeing her artwork.  As she treaded home on the icy, grey sidewalk she passed over a small metal bridge that connected downtown and her neighborhood.  She leaned against the frozen guardrail before losing her footing on the ice as she tumbled into the waters below, unconscious.  They said it did not take long for her to drown.

    My biggest regret is that I never told her how I cared for her, even if I was the only one.  I missed so many chances to make her life at least slightly more content before her untimely demise.  It was during her funeral that I stopped being afraid and began a bitter path of anguish and regret that proceeded into the following months.  I hope that telling this story will help me forgive myself before I descend too deep into my own pit of self-destruction.

    But there is still one factor that weighs on my mind.

    I wonder if she wanted to die.

And in my nineteenth summer, I stared into Eternity. The smoky waves lapping the shore of slate like the rhythmic ticking of the hand of the clock. Ticking, ticking, and my heart beat. The tides ride upon eternal life, the seconds forever reviving, but not me. My chest is slowed with every beat.

Early shadows present themselves before me. Knowing love: the tender touch of a mother, the sunlight in her eyes. The suns that fade as the clouds of time and fate drift slowly by. Grasping hands of early playmates for a praise or a scorning. The warmth of younger summer beating down on me, softening the soul. They show my age. The show my soul and I was afraid.

I had long ago learned the embrace fear, my closest friend, the one I wish I could shake from my back. A parasite, the Insect, finding nourishment in my humanity. How I wished I could lean from the precipice like the sea rose and flow in the wind above that Eternity, perhaps disregarding my finity.

And in my nineteenth summer, my feet did detach from the pebbled Earth, my body rising to the sky, dark and thick as charcoal. That sky was another infinity, unyielding, unmoved. And I watered that Earth with the tears that burned my eyes. They scorched the soil. They poisoned the sea. And yet they still added to my dear Eternity.

Bigger and bigger it grew, enveloping Nature's Creation and human civilization in its gurgling wake. The snapping of orchards, the tearing of stone, all of it ticking, ticking, like the hand of the clock.

There were other souls like me, blanketed in ash or covered in sores. And around and around they danced about me, oddly enchanting, but all were distressed. The young and the old reached out to me, but burning my flesh, their touch made me cry. And upon their back I saw my old enemy. That Insect wished to consume me and I fought to save my last scrap of humanity. I turned my eyes from them, though their wailing tore my soul and I was afraid.

And then I saw it, that radiant beam, a fissure in my blackened ceiling. Slowly, I creeped before it, circling the light it gave up to the sea. My hair was bathed in its sunlight, my bones becoming solid, my tears becoming mere dreams.

I remembered what a man had written, many years before about a valiant struggle, but a much smaller ocean. I could not help but smile with the memory.

Then, sighing bravely, I tossed my Albatross into the sea. I sounded with a bitter plop and was enfolded within sweet Eternity.

...

Fin.