your beautiful sadness

Statement of intent - Shinayah Ko

This short story is about the feeling “melancholy”; the sadness with no reason for being. It portrays a character's relationship with the emotion and its impact on their life by personifying the feeling into a character. Sensory language is used to tether the reader to the main character, where although the writing is not in first person, the narration itself embodies the thought processes of the character. I chose to do this for two reasons, to separate the reader from only the characters perspective, and also because I believe thoughts and the endeavours of the mind don’t come in the “I…” format. For me, using “I…” to describe a character's thought processes removes some plane of realism, and in some cases feels childish. I wanted people to make their own interpretations of the story, and come to conclusions about this feeling we have all had for themselves. The main character covers some bases; she first runs from her sadness, then later gives up her responsibilities altogether and clings to her sadness. Neither of these paths she takes gives her a positive outcome, and she eventually settles on the understanding that the feeling is organic and wild, something that should not be embraced nor avoided; simply another feature to life. The purpose of this story is to make people think differently about the way they interact with their emotions, to entertain, and hopefully to satisfy. I try to write with rhythm in order to create something beautiful. My goal is that the reader will still think about the contents of the story long after they’ve finished reading.

Your Beautiful Sadness

I come here to breathe. A young girl with a satchel wove through the undergrowth. There is a kind of vibrance only a truly wild forest has. It fills your lungs and tastes like life. It’s this place where I can finally be at peace. So if you visit and I am not home, I must apologise. You won’t find me. I am here, with the forest. The sun’s kiss of light speckled every bough and leaf, casting warm, dappled shadows. The girl dove under branches and glided over roots as she waltzed down the path she could see with her eyes closed. Deeper into this place that was only hers she went, until the sight of the apartment was gone and the forest grew coarser and darker and wilder. Further and further in she trekked, to the place where the air was thinner and the trees more solemn.

She stopped before a wall of ivy to roll the satchel off of her shoulder. Out came her lantern and the matches, because she knew where she was going. Once she could hear the gentle flutter of the flame within the glass, she pushed past the green wall into an expanse of darkness and all sounds ceased at once.

The forest’s heart was of rich mossy colour; a gargantuan cave with a roof of leaves somewhere far above. Here in her dark green paradise she wandered, beside the highway of silent black waters, looking for a good place to sit and focus . Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a flash of wood. It was not the moss laden wood of the ancient trees that stood, respectfully distant from one another in the black water at her feet. It was crude, man made, the veins of its wood grain exposed and shaven smooth. In this wild, secret place, it looked imaginary, and out of place. The small wooden row boat had caught itself in the arms of a bush on its drift down the river. The girl looked out at the forever of darkness where she could imagine the boat, its oars long lost to the current, meandering endlessly into the distance, to a place so far away from the real world that she felt she could never go. She left the boat behind and found her spot, setting down the satchel and lantern amongst the roots of a tree that was so wide it felt like a wall. She sunk into the cushion of moss and began rifling through the satchel for her study books. Truly there was no better place to study than this; where her mind was clear and her heart was light. However, this time there was a drooping corner in the fabric of her soul. She pushed it aside but the image of the boat did not leave her mind. For once, she could not focus on her textbooks. A headache formed, as they do when one denies the curiosities of the heart. She put her books down, as the question would not abandon her. What would happen if she took the boat? If she placed one foot and then the other into its little wooden frame, and pushed away from the embrace of the land? If she let the waters take her to the place where the world wasn’t real, without any way to steer herself, to turn around and change her mind? She took out her journal. It was red.

I don’t know what to do with this notion. I am writing it down. Maybe I will feel better.

There are many paths you can take in life, I suppose.

The girl tucked her knees to her chest and laid her head on them. Of course, it wasn’t really a possibility. She had a mother, a father, and a brother, although he was away. As well as that she had her studies which she religiously worked on in order to achieve her dream. There was no boat.

She did not feel any better. Instead the girl felt like stagnant water. At some point it had rained and she was fresh, but now she was old and dirty, and the mosquitoes had come to lay their brood. Infested was she, with the strange thoughts in her mind. It was like rotting. A weight on her heart urged her to put down her books and hide forever. “Stop and give up” it whispered softly. “Rest”. She wanted to run from it, but there was nowhere to go, so she dug her face into her arms and tried to ignore the foreign feelings that welled up inside. The boat is pathetic. Everything is pathetic. I hate it. The boat. Everything. When she had finished writing she closed her eyes, and it was dark.

The trees were alive. The forest was bathed in hues of the richest blues, and even the flame in her lantern glowed a decadent turquoise. Each leaf and fern was living and dancing like a world of dark ocean snakes. Her sleeve was wet where her eyes had been, and although she couldn’t remember lifting her head, she found herself staring out into the empty space before her, for there was a presence coming toward her from the darkness. At first it was only a speck of blue light, and then it was there in front of her. A beautiful creature from the heart of the forest made his way to her. Where he stepped, the plants wriggled and fluttered, as if he had wind in the soles of his feet. The boy had striking azure hair that waved around slowly, and as he came closer to her, his graceful, still eyes never moved from her face. She felt a stinging in her cheeks, where they were raw from her own tears. The next sting was that of humiliation and the wet sleeve rose up to sweep her face. He probably thought she’d been crying. The sleeve retreated, and the girl nearly jumped. He was right before her now, his face merely a breath from her own, and his graceful pale hands drifted to her cheeks. It was only once she realigned to his earnest gaze that he spoke. And the boy had the gentle voice of one who speaks very seldom. “Are you afraid of me? Don’t be afraid.” His hands were cold.

The girl's head snapped up to a dark world. Smoke rose languidly from the candle in her lantern. The cold suggested that too much time had passed. She unfurled her body only to see that the journal had made its way into her lap. Before falling asleep she must have left it there. When she rolled to the latest page, the writing was restless. If my feelings were people, I’m sure sadness would be the ugliest. I hate it all. A vision of fair blue hair and graceful eyes darted across her mind indignantly. She shut the book. Picking up the lantern and textbooks, the girl rose to her feet and began to pick her way through the forest to go home.

Well, I guess not. But I still hate it. It’s the worst one. The desk lamp buzzed. Gosh, why had she fallen asleep? Now there was so much work left to do. She begged her mind to focus on the writing before her eyes. As she hastily wrote answers to each question, the words began to slide off the page. They laughed and danced as they melted off the desk toward the floor. “Where do you think you’re going?” the girl reached out a fast hand to snatch up the words. Once her fingers closed around them, they screamed and swore at her. There was a knock on the door. When she looked back at her hands there was nothing, and the writing in her textbook trailed off with a scribble.

“Isra? Can I come in?”

“Mmhm”

The door opened and her mother walked in with a steaming bowl.

“Staying up late?”

“I couldn’t get enough done”

“Don’t make a habit of staying out there too late. It’s not good to have dinner at this time.”

“Mmhm”

“Go have a shower, you’re like a little grub… hm?”

“Mmhm!!”

The bowl was left on the desk beside her. She closed her blurring eyes and dropped her heavy head onto the cold paper. Maybe pen marks would be left on her forehead. It didn’t really matter. She turned her head and stared at the bowl that loomed close to her face. Steam curled up from its top, its ribbony form illuminated by the light from her noisy lamp. She had to get work done. She had to work. The pen was on the floor. But she had to study. “I should be hungry…” The smoke twirled and danced on its ascent upwards. It was a candle. A blue one. She turned around her chair to a room bathed in ultramarine, and there he was; the boy had sat himself on her bean bag in the library corner. He was engrossed in a book. How distracting. “Why are you here again?” He didn’t even lift his eyes. He licked a finger and turned the page.

She tried to ignore him and study, but her textbook was a collection of blank pages. Where did the words go? The sound of rustling paper broke the silence. She whirled around again and marched toward the boy. Grabbing his jumper, she pulled him forcefully from his reading. “Go away! I’m trying to study!” His blank stare pleaded innocence. She let go of the fabric with a push and pointed. “I can’t focus when you’re here, so can’t you just leave? How did you even get here? -Never mind that, why? Nothing bad has happened. Hm?” His hand hesitantly reached for his book but his eyes were on her when he spoke. “What did I do? First you are scared, and then you’re angry. I am only sitting here” She opened her mouth to reply-

“Isra!”

When she lifted her head from the desk, the room was no longer blue. A paper was stuck to her face, and when she peeled it off she frowned. Damn, there was only one line of writing.

“Isra! Grub. Did you shower?! Go shower!”

She stood up in a flash. “Going, going!” For a moment she looked at the untouched food, but the few bites she stuffed in tasted like sand. The girl stretched and turned off the desk lamp before making her way to the door. What could she do? She just wasn’t hungry.

The girl's mother stepped over the boxes on the floor into the small dining room space with two cups of tea. “Thanks” murmured her husband when she placed the coffee beside his laptop. She seated herself and watched him blindly reaching for the mug, his eyes engrossed in the work on his screen.

“Do you think our girl is seeming a little down lately?” She stirred the mug, the teabag spun helplessly.

“She was always happy, even when studying, but it looks like she is struggling with focus lately.”

Her husband raised his eyes from the top of the computer to smile reassuringly at her. His hands finally made contact with the mug.

“Isra is a good girl. But she has taken the hard path. It’s not easy to be a surgeon. She has to study hard.”

The girl’s mother thought about this. Her husband turned back to the screen.

“Everyone feels sad sometimes.” He continued. “She needs to learn how to continue living her life in those times. Leave her be, trust her to work things out on her own”

The girl named Isra stood wreathed in the steam from a hot shower. Past the crack in the shower curtain squatted the window, which had only the dark night behind its glass face. As she watched the water roll from her fringe and felt it trickle down her cheeks, an inexplicable mellow emotion overtook her. She was tired. So tired. The study was hard, never ending. Life was tedious. It was almost relieving to admit it; that she wanted to give up on everything. She wanted to sink away from it all. Both the good and the bad left her empty and the world seemed bluer than before, somehow. There was an overwhelming comfort to it all. It was beautiful, so beautiful. The feeling was graceful, a thin ribbon of blue that danced with her soul. It was time to rest. She turned off the water and threw the curtain aside, relishing the melancholy ecstasy of insatiable disappointment.

In the middle of the night, a young girl with hazy eyes emerges from the bathroom. Down the hall she goes, the walls humming with cobalt hues, as she meanders back to her blue door. When she opens it, a blue boy is the only thing she sees, standing in the centre of her room. The girl walks toward him, reaching her hands out. She sinks into the folds of his jumper, and the blue fabric engulfs her like a river, the solid comfort of his body surrounds her. Tears begin to fall from her eyes and oh, she could live here forever. Blue was beautiful.

It was the birds chirping that woke her up, and the streaming pale sunlight. The folds of fabric she had been hugging so tightly to was her own bed. Maybe it looked greyer than usual, well, she didn’t really care. Instead of shaking the weights from her mind and returning to the pile of textbooks on the desk, she flung the grey blankets over her head and dug into them. She wanted to go back to the dream, to the comforting embrace of melancholy. Although breathing under the duvet was less than ideal, it was nicer than having to see her desk and all the things on it. That didn’t stop it from being there, apparently, and it tickled the edge of her mind, so she jumped from the bed and scooped up her lantern. Hastily walking from the house, she saw the words on the books slipping off their pages, running out onto the floor. Her pace quickened as she ascended the hill, and the words began to pour from the windows and door. They ate up her house, searching for her. She began to run.

Ducking under branches and jumping over clusters of roots, the girl raced through the forest down the path she could see with her eyes closed. It was hard to run, for she was caught like a fish in a net of blue ribbon. She rushed to light the lantern before scrambling through the ivy curtain in a sprint. The words barrelled after her. Out of the corner of her eye flashed a ghost of pale wood. She kept running until finally she was there, down beneath the tree she always sat under. Oh.

The rush left her, the world was dark, and she was alone with her lantern and the tree. A warm red book lay amongst the roots, nestled on a cushion of moss. She stooped to pick it up and flick through its pages. Ah- why had she been running? She felt her knees buckle and give way into the soft moss. The tree roots picked her up and nursed her while she lay still. The adrenaline rush had left her void of energy. She was tired, so she lifted pages instead of her legs. It felt as though she had become a lazy person, but surely there was no escape from the blue that wrapped itself around her back, looping its way across her limbs. It was pleading with her to give in, to fall into the nestling comfort of sleep. She felt trapped by the blue ribbon she had danced with, expecting maybe that this was it. Perhaps she would lie here at the ankles of this tree forever, in the secret place. Yes, it seemed like a good idea. She’d stay there forever. But something on the page beckoned to her, a scribble of bouncy writing. It was all bones and muscle names and the sort, but she couldn’t stop staring at it. She had written this. She turned to the first page.

Page 01. 08/03/15

This is the journal of a great surgeon. My name is Isra, and I will save lives. People will read this one day and be inspired by how happy I am. They will ask: “why are you so happy? Dr. Isra? And I will say, because I am doing what I love.

That’s right. The girl mused. She had had a plan for her life, a goal, an ideal for the future. Once she started she could not stop reading. Every page she turned recalled to her the delirious euphoria of chasing after a dream. How could she have forgotten the joy of spending each living moment pouring out blood and sweat into her passion? But she understood that her old way of thinking had been naive. The path she had chosen for herself was wild and coarse. She had always known that it was always going to be hard. Could she really have expected to stay happy forever? Would life not become monotonous, like listening to a single note of a song without ever moving on? Perhaps the forest had given her the break she’d needed. Her mind felt clearer, lighter. She thought about the ribbon.

Who was it really that trapped her?

When she lifted her eyes, the world wasn’t blue anymore. Around her the still forest was filled with dark greens and browns. But in her hand she was clutching a ribbon. She got to her feet and followed it through the carpet of short grass and ferns. All the way around the tree it came to an end; where a boy with azure hair lay comatose amongst the tree roots, wrapped in the blue ribbon. It took some time, but the girl managed to loosen the strands. She picked at knot after knot, and released roll after roll of ribbon. The boy began to wake, and he watched until the moment she could finally pull him free. Once he was standing she let go of the ribbon in her hands, and put them both in his, there was no humiliation to contaminate the tears that rolled down her cheeks. “So you were here” she whispered. His smile was gentle. “It wasn’t meant to be for this long. I have to go back.” She nodded earnestly at his words, and slowly he began to billow up into the air like smoke. “I’ll be coming back. Will you be afraid?” She shook her head and he put his face closer. “Will you trap me in your heart again, so that I can’t go?” she felt the corner of her mouth twitch upward.

“No.”

Most of his body had faded into the wind.

“You’re beautiful, but you’re not mine to keep.”

Gently she released his hands, and the wind took him away; back to the place where the world wasn’t real. The young girl sat down once more with her journal. She was glad to discover her pen was still in the satchel.

My name is Isra. I like to be happy, because people always said I should be. I’m embarrassed to cry, too. It’s hard, but sometimes we feel sadness without any reason. It always felt like there was something wrong with me. But now I understand. I think maybe, it’s by feeling both happiness and sadness that we can be sure we are alive.

On her way home, she found the row boat. With a quick push, she released it from the bushes and watched as it sailed alone down the black waters to places she couldn’t go.

I have chosen my path.

An older girl walks through a vibrant forest. It’s with intuition that she dodges branches and roots, clinging to that little strand of memory that tells her she’s in the right place, even though everything has grown wilder. Perhaps it became less friendly when she was away, because it hadn’t seen her face in so long. Her hat catches on a branch. Maybe she shouldn’t have come in her graduation clothes, but excitement drew her onward with haste. She was older now- she could go deeper into the forest than when she was younger. Finally she made it to the ivy curtain, although pushing past the coils was harder than it used to be. When the leaves closed behind her, she was wrapped in the silence and darkness of her secret place. She felt like she was gliding as she wandered over the mossy carpet and past tree after tree. Unlike the rest of the forest outside, this place was timeless. If the great trees had grown any bigger she would not have noticed, as even her whole lifespan would be like a blink in their eyes. She hoped they would remember her.

A leaf drifted down from the distant roof of thick branches and dark green. She tracked it as it landed on the still water, slowly rolling off into the distance, compelled by an invisible current. She followed the leaf from land, staring at the way its edges curled up, how the water didn’t enter inside its cupped form. How long she wandered the girl didn’t know, but at some point she became conscious of a rushing noise that filled the forest’s heart she had always thought devoid of sound. It grew louder, and louder, until she stood at the edge of a tall waterfall. The little leaf rolled off the edge and disappeared into the mist below.

The girl laughed to herself a little. She went home.