project madness

before

before: //error: unknown?

the world doesn't end abruptly. it burns to ashes slowly.

the world doesn't end valiantly. it doesn't end with a bang. it goes down pleading and begging and clawing at threads of desecrated hope. half of it goes down screaming, like a coward. the other goes down without a sound, a slow descent into destruction.

she wore blue to her parents' funeral. i remember sitting a few pews back, watching the back of her dark curls cascade over her blue dress. it was a bunch of different materials stitched together, all different shades and textures of blue. i remember the neighborhood ladies twittering about her attire with sharp glances that wanted to scissor her dress to pieces. they thought she should be wearing black, like any other mourner.

i thought she was wearing blue because it was the color of the ocean and her parents died in the ocean. that was her way of paying tribute to them. i thought it was fantastic.

then again, i pretty much thought everything that had to do with tatiana wales was fantastic, from her sea breeze eyes down to her greatness-bound shoes.

that was the thing about tatiana – she believed she was on a path to greatness, and everything before that was just for her to pass through. that was how she got through all the bad parts, she told me, much later. she knew she was just passing through.

greatness doesn't necessarily have to be good. greatness can be good, and wonderful, and right. it can also be terrible, and vindictive, and vengeful, but it's greatness nonetheless.

i can't tell you which one tatiana thought she was headed to at first, but i can tell you which one she ended up at. i can't tell you if it started when she stood in a blue dress and threw dirt on her parents' coffins, or when she stopped going to church with her grandmother to ask god for forgiveness because she didn't believe she had to apologize for losing her parents, or when she dragged me to a store to pick out blue pajamas and blue sheets and blue curtains for the new room the foster parents had given her, but i can tell you that it ended quite differently than all those books and movies and television shows put it up to be.

this is the way the world ends: begging for forgiveness it doesn't deserve.