literature

Mistaken Masterpiece

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baby-filly's avatar
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Literature Text

She stared at her masterpiece, her grey eyes filled with bemusement.

She had spent her entire life on this labour of love, this sprawling expanse of another world that mapped love and hatred, sorrow and joy, good and evil, and all the shades of grey in between those polar opposites.

She had spent hours, days, weeks, months hunched over her lined A4 notebook. Never a computer. She had skipped meals and social occasions, conversations and friendships.

When she had placed the last word of the first draft of her novel, she had been twenty, and was already thinking of ways in which she could improve it. She stayed locked in her minuscule study, still working on her piece with the same adoration and wonderment as she had felt burning in her soul all those years back, when, with a shaking hands and a blue crayon, she had scribbled down the first sentence of the project that would come to dominate and dictate the course of her life after it.

She grew older, dropping out of her education to concentrate on her story, surviving with a part time job as a checkout girl at a supermarket. She shunned those who attempted to be her friend, and took up very few of the propositions of men willing to give her more than friendship. Why would she need real companionship when the characters she made up in her mind were so much more realistic to her?

And so she went on jotting down story ideas and plot twists, growing older and older, yet never losing her passion, never caring that no one ever called to ask her how her work was coming along.

Her life went on. Her life was the book, but she never worried that once she had completed the book, she would have no life left.

When she wrote the very last word that made her masterpiece perfect, she was thirty-five. She sat back and looked at the stack of paper crowding up her desk, spilling over onto the floor. Her life's sole ambition, finished and in the palm of hands. Well, almost.

She knew she should be feeling something, but...nothing came. She felt utterly hollow.

As she sat inert, searching inside of herself for some emotion, any emotion, the phone rang, its strident tone blaring out into the echoing silence, making her jump. Absently, she answered it, presuming it to be a wrong number. No one called her of their own volition anymore.

She was wrong. It was her mother, whom she had not spoken to for almost eight years. The authoress felt shame welling up within her suddenly. She asked her mother what was wrong, panicked. Surely something awful had occurred?

Again, she was proved wrong.

"Honey, it's so good to hear your voice!" Her mother told her, her tone coloured with love, and relief to find her daughter well. The shame became more acute. "So, sweetie, we haven't spoke in so long, and I was just wondering how the masterpiece was getting on."

For a long moment that at the same time felt like an eternity and a microsecond, the woman stared at her telephone. Then, lifting the phone to her mouth, she whispered softly:

"You know what, Mom? I don't think it matters anymore."

She hung up and picked up the very first page of the story that had so nearly swallowed her whole. With hands calloused from writing so frequently, she tore the sheet neatly in half, smiling.

The masterpiece was ripped to irreparable shreds that day, the day when she realised that the world, and not some stupid manuscript, was where she should be living.
She doesn't have a name. She embodies all the writers out there who've ever hated the words.

As a dedicated writer myself, it was difficult to write this, and I still have mixed feelings about it. Any critique is desperately needed and would be greatly appreciated. :heart:

For *100ThemesChallenge, variation one, theme 6: Break Away.

(c) Me, ~baby-filly.
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Mattpwnsall's avatar
Wow! Very emotional and strong! I like it!