Beautifully Broken

Just an idea of a prologue that popped into my head recently. I'm not sure if I'll continue it, but we'll just see :)

~ES~

 

 

 

Beautifully Broken

 

 

 

 

 

 

“My grief lies all within, and these external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells with the silence of the tortured soul.”  William Shakespeare 

 

 

 

Life. There is so much power behind that one, seemingly simple word, it is nearly incomprehensible.  You can give life, or you can take life.  You can witness the first breaths of a new life, full of hope and promise, or you can witness the last labored breaths of a life at its end.  Beyond this, you can be the cause of new life, you can choose to save a life that was never meant to be, or you can choose to be the cause of a life, extinguished.  Your destiny depends entirely upon which of these two options you choose you act on.  

 

Choice.  There is another word of incomprehensible meaning.  Sure, you can choose to have a pop tart over cereal for breakfast.  You can choose to wear Converses over Vans to school.  You make choices everyday and think nothing of it.  However, it is only when you are faced with the choice between life and death do you realize how complex the word ’choice’ really is.  The choice to give life over taking life, the choice to kill or be killed, your priorities change when you find yourself  in a situation you never thought you would be in.  

 

Guilt.  I could go on forever about guilt.  For some reason though, everyone shies away from the subject of guilt.  Why?  Most people have no reason to.  Sure, they may have cheated on at test, or stole something from the store, but really, guilt gets much more ugly that just feeling bad about petty thievery.  For example, the guilt of thinking you have been the cause of death, and the guilt of knowing you were the cause are two different kinds of guilt - or are they?  If you thought you caused someone’s life to end, would you even feel any guilt? I mean, you didn’t know them and it wasn’t really your fault, right?  What if it was someone you knew though?  What if it was a girl you talked to occasionally at school?  Would you feel guilty then?  Even worse, what if it was someone you loved?  What if it was your mother, or father, or little sister?  What if it was all of them?  It is easier to say you would feel less guilty if it was someone you never even met.  I am here to tell you that, life, choice, and guilt go hand in hand.  I fact, they are pretty much the staples of my life’s story.  I know from first hand experience that guilt caused by death, is torture, it doesn’t matter if you caused it or not.  

 

But perhaps you do know, perhaps you are only reading this because you want to compare your life with mine.  I would ask that you not do this.  Our lives are different.  No one has the same story to tell, if we did, there would be no stories.  Children would go to bed in silence, no bedtime stories, no lullabies.  The world would be a machine and we would simply be robots, all the same, all without personalities.  Our stories define who we are, they are our legacy.  Our stories are our lives.  If we thought objectively, always considering the big picture, we could predict how our stories end.  We could make our lives a fairytale.  However, this is rarely the case.  If it were, I can assure you that I would have planed my life a whole lot differently.  Selfish humanity though, make living in the moment so much more appealing…in the moment.  We are so blinded by how living in the moment makes us feel, that we can’t step outside ourselves enough to see that ‘living in the moment’ is really just tearing us down.  

 

You have your story and I have mine.  We both have our ups and downs and our good sides and bad sides.  I have chosen to write my story down so, if others read it, it may help them to realize that things in their own lives may not be as wonderful as they seem…that “living in the moment” may not be what’s best.  If you choose to follow my example by writing your own story down, I will be sure to read it, but as it stands, this story belongs to me and me only.  This story of my life is neither better nor worse than yours because I,  Raye Mackenzie Van Allen  am unique in every way and my story is my legacy.