And the Heavens Split (finished)

And the Heavens Split

   Sunlight and shadow flash across the mountain.

   I watch the clouds skim over the pensive sky, mottling the mountain dark and light and dark again.

   The clouds are memories. They sail across the sky like so many ships, sweeping and grand and so full of sorrow. How can they be so white and pure? They will soon age silver with beads of rain, and then? Then they will weep. How can they masquerade as something so innocent when in the end, they can turn only to sorrow?

   But perhaps my view of the sky has been corrupted by what the clouds gave me.

   Some other girl might have thought the cloud's gift was a blessing. I don't know. I wasn't some other girl. I was me, and I was terrified. Some other girl might have thought he was an angel. As for me? From the very beginning I knew he wasn't an angel, though I cannot possibly describe how I knew.

   If I were forced to give a reason for my certainty, however, I suppose I would say that angels are supposed to be perfect. They are meant to be flawless, protectors from human folly, beings unfathomable to mortal minds. Aren't they?

   He was so many things. He was a hundred thousand things, but I would be a fool to claim that perfection was one of them. I was a fool then—false love and true fear will do that to a person—and now that I've paid the price, I am loath to be one any longer. I don't want any connection to the naive, weak, helpless girl I used to be.

   Plainly put, I lived in the mountains then. I would never name the precise location; I would do anything to forget that place. (Of course, it's too often that we can never have what we want most. It's funny, really, that life is like that.) I will say, though, that I lived with my parents and sister in a house of love and laughter and light. And I will say that that little home could have protected me, if I had only cleaved to it. It should have been enough, it should have been my everything, but I always wanted more. What "more" meant I never knew, but finding it somehow meant that I needed to wander the forest surrounding my house every moment that I wasn't imprisoned in school, climbing trees, weaving flowers in my hair, imitating bird calls, and pressing leaves in my leather-bound journal.

   Oh, how I loved my journal. I filled it with observations about the world around me, little poems and ditties, sketches of plants and animals, rubbings of leaves and rocks...and especially with notes about the sky. I don't remember when I started paying so much attention to the sky—the habit must have started when I was very young—yet every day I made sure to note its color. When words failed, I drew it, using the jumble of colored pencils at the bottom of my backpack to sweep blues and grays across the page.

   Because of my fascination with the sky, I can flip to July 16th in my journal and remember its exact shade: a too-still charcoal, the clouds hanging from its expanse fat and sluggish with rain. I remember stalking through the forest that day, bored and lethargic for no other reason than the fact that I was a seventeen-year-old girl perpetually searching for something she could not find. I drew the sky in my journal, I picked flowers, I sang...everything which I normally loved but which seemed unbearably monotonous that day. I wished that something would happen, that I would find my "more."

   Then.

   Then, like a miracle, I did.

   A raindrop alighted on the tip of my nose, and I quickly wrapped my journal in my jacket before stuffing it into my backpack to save it from the downpour that would soon follow. Sure enough, the single raindrop soon escalated into furious sheets of rain. The rain soaked me to the bone, but I didn't care. I felt wild that day. I knew something was about to happen, and I knew that it just might be what I was searching for.