Scribo Scribere

I entered the ballroom with single-minded purpose: I meant to have it out with her. Because of me, she would be an exile from her home and ostracized to a foreign land. To harbor such sentiments as she had is to commit treason toward all of one’s fellows. I was there not to reform how she thought, but to utterly destroy her notions, so grounded in the ideology that every thought she had and every move she made was a wonder and marvel of nature, that to me they seemed complete idiocy. I did not yet see her in the crowd of dresses, of which hers was certainly the loveliest (cursed be that it was a masquerade ball; everyone you wanted to talk to you couldn’t find, because they would not take off their masks), but I decided to try to find she who was the center of attention.

            I knew no one in the room: all her friends, as most in the city were. To them, she was charming; her friends and admirers brushed away her faults as if they had not been insulted by her.

            “But what had she done?” you ask. She was queen of a thousand faults, but, especially, she was the analog of Lucifer, rising high above the status quo. This had me ready to jump off the plank, if only, by means of the water, to find blissful separation from her. Maybe I should have given her the benefit of thinking her ill, but she had offended me too much for that. The argument for her sanity seemed to lie only with her own reasoning: with her so much above the rest, she must certainly know her own mind.

            I wandered through a sea of masks but could not find her. So good was she at hiding from those who did not think her the darling idyll of theirs minds, that in a crowd only her friends recognized her. I thought to ask where she was, but clandestine me could not do so. Still, I had to relay to her the anger to which she drove me, finding catharsis only in confrontation. I would reason with her, not for her benefit but for my own, because her soul could never be reformed. By turning her venom on me, she had chosen her company.

I stirred through the crowd, a smile here, a drink there, some words you always say to people you meet. I looked for the crowd around her, people who did not realize she had offended them, too. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and scream, “Quit your childhood and wake up!” Did she not know that every word she wrote obliterated the boundary between what is decent and what is not? She should have had a sign reading, “Keep Away” on her mask.

            Did she simply believe that all that was, was a product of her mind’s intersection with some referential frame? Was she simply an inappropriately-tempered fool? Because who, being grown, does not know the basic rules of humanity?

            And then I saw her – of course the most beautiful woman in the room. I bypassed waltzing couples, moving right and left toward her.

            She was talking to a man. He was engrossed. I had expected her to be less steady, never content, always casting her eyes onto new quarries. But she was not; her eyes were constantly on her interlocutor. Still, I could not relent –she would certainly steal the heart of any man, then play with it before moving on to her next victim, leaving him crying and besotted on the streets. Oh, how I couldn’t stand her hedonism, based on some sickening perception of the world as founded for, by, and because of her alone!

            Her interlocutor left. She looked around, not at me at first, avoiding me. I did not pity her aloneness; we cannot buy friends. Finally she looked at me, then averted her eyes. I approached.

            “Hello,” she said. I nodded. She blinked, looked side to side with that self-assurance I had expected to find. She extended a hand.

            “I’m –  ” she said. When I did not take her hand, her smile faltered, as if I had told her exactly how I felt about her. She withdrew her hand; we stared at each other. I felt like the last sane person there, screaming to the crowd how unsubstantiated this woman’s empire over them was. But they flitted about, not knowing the insults launched at them – yet the woman and they were still friends, and –

            It suddenly struck me: where were my friends? Were they in the ballroom? Had I left them on the stair? Were they scattered through foreign countries? Did they think writing the most noble craft?

            And I felt something inside me that should not have been there: the subtle recognition of another’s sadness. I had only meant to inform her that I did not think all her methodologies were incorrect, that she had begun at a point sure to leave her with a Luciferian future, a sharp rise and a powerful drop. What was it? I could not go through with it; I wanted to say at once that, if only she just stopped trying, she would have the world at her feet, which would, also, have maybe assuaged her earthly pain.

            Could I say this, her mask distorting her nature, so striving, insulting the world as if she were the only one who mattered, her whole nature infuriating; and yet, her eyes – sad eyes, my own eyes, everyone’s – I did not tell her that what had made me so angry were her human eyes, on which mine now rested, she whom I had wanted to castigate for trying to rise too high, cheating on us who wanted to go the steady rather than the untenable route, but which now landed me fully in the inability, because of those eyes, to speak to her angrily of things I had perceived.