Once Upon a Never...

You thought the story would end once you stepped through the door, didn't you?

Nah. Like, all stories, there's always an empty space, in between the action, where the characters sit in the rain and watch the damp leaves blow agains the porch steps, or trip as they're running up the stairs because they really, really have to pee. But none of that is glamorous, so it doesn't make it into the novel.

This is one of those empty spaces. You wouldn't know it unless I told you, because you know, it's your life. Sometimes it seems like evey day is an empty space, but that's completely beside the point. 

The door creaks shut behind you, and the bolt slides shut with a click. You didn't used to lock the door, but one of those unrecorded empty spaces before the story had occurred, and now everyone in your family has to carry a key, or they'd have to live on the stoop. You kick your shoes off into the pile to the right of the door, because nothing in your house is as sacred as the carpets, and snow and carpets do not get on together all that well. You're pretty sure that that pile will eat your shoes, someday, but for now you'll let it be. Shoes aren't that important, anyway.

Mount the stairs - one two, three four skip the fifth because it creaks like a banshee if you even touch it, light on the sixth, seven eight, ten then you're up. Two doors down - you walk quietly, because the baby's probably asleep, and if that step sounds like a banshee then there's not even a simile fit for describing Lauralee when she opens her mouth - and here's your room, the poster-painted door cracked open because you're pretty sure it doesn't even shut anymore, and if it does you don't care in the morning to force it. You're still being quiet, but you almost lose it when you trip over a skatebooard and have to launch yourself at your bed to keep from faceplanting into the floor. Mattress, wall, then the what the hell a skateboard?! pings off the back of your head, and you look back at your door to see the impish face of another munchkin sibling peering around the lintel. A cackle and a dive for the board and he's off around the corner and down the stairs. The fifth step screams as he tumbles down, his boyish laughter drifting back up in his wake.

You wish he'd decide that girls were cool so that he'd quit thinking of ways to kill you as he was riding home surrounded by seven-thousand of his equally impish friends on the bus. Elementary teachers didn't give enough homework.

It's too quiet, though. You should be hearing her voice on the other end of a phone line. It's quiet, without her voice. You flip open your phone, dial a number, your number, actually, and there she is. Why had she recorded your voicemail, anyway? That had been a major moment of weekness. You'd taken crap for that for weeks. Now you'd have to record it again - same old song and dance. Leave your message at the beep! Maybe you'd leave it. She has to call, sometime. 

You flip the phone shut and lean back on your pillows. It's not worth thinking about. She's not coming back. 

But now you're thinking about her, and that's not the best way to go. This is why they don't usually narrate the black spaces in novels. They're just... not that interesting, generally. People trip on skateboards, listen to old voicemails, dream about things they should give up on. People keep living.

You sit up with a sigh. It's only four o'clock, there's no use going downstairs. The baby will be up in a bit, though. Maybe you'll play with her. Kids aren't that bad. Except for when they boobytrap your door. You really should start closing that. Anyway. Your mom's probably started dinner. You could pretend to be doing homework, but that doesn't even seem appealing, at the moment. Oh well.

Back down the stairs, skip the fifth, spin into the kitchen, back into a life you just don't really feel like living.

Oh well.

Life's going on.

With or without you.

You were sweet for a moment, then the wind blew you away like the snow, with the snow, now you're cold, and if you're not dead then you're gone, and I guess that's all. 

With a sigh she kicked through the angst and stepped on a crack in the ice on purpose, just to hear it crunch beneath her shoes.  Someone called from behind her, back there in the schoolyard. She didn't turn around, since she could see him standing there in her mind, exactly as she'd seen him stand since the first time she'd met him. She wanted to smile as she walked, and the ice cracked beneath her shoes, and he stood calling after her from the empty schoolyard. Instead she walked, and the ice cracked beneath her shoes, and chose to live in ignorance. 

The wind's still blowing, babe. Let it take you.

Shift perspectives, take a breath, breath it out and watch it cloud and crystallize and float into the sky and the sun like you suppose your spirit will, some day. But hell, it's still there. Your spirit, and your breath, so you might as well turn back to the schoolyard and sometime home, because she's not coming back. 

Turn and step, but you've got to look back, just in case she's running to you, in case you've got to stretch your arms out one more time. No, no, just step, you fool. No going back, now. Trail your fingers along the chainlink fence, to keep them from tearing out your hair, listen to the vibrations -- that'll be your sound. It'll sing along with the ice that's cracking beneath her shoes. You're that ice, you're sure. It'd be your heart, if you hadn't already left that by the gate. Who the hell needs a heart, anyway? Yours will be frozen solid, soon enough, if it wasn't already. It was better off, that way. 

You might write a song, because hell, that was what all of the emo kids did when they left their hearts in the snow and watched their souls float up into the arms of the sun. They wrote songs, and other emo kids cried their hearts out (they wanted them in the snow, too, and that's the only way they know how, you guess) and wrote your name on their arms and their chests and took pictures and posted their angst in your MySpace comments, and for a moment you had seven million friends, because all of their hearts were frozen, now. Everyone's gotta identify with something.

You stopped dragging your fingers through the links and broke the pencil in your pocket.

It was for the best of all the emo kids. 

The pencil's in the snow with your heart, now. You hope half-heartedly (no heartedly, you suppose, your heart is frozen in the snow) that someone steps on it. Just to make sure it's never used for evil, again. Let the poor thing rest in peace, there in the snow, numb to the world. Its job was done - it had written it's last fraction, last half-written note to a girl walking in the opposite direction, ice cracking beneath her shoes, always confident in her assumptions. Mentally note its location, because it was a good friend, really. Goodnight, friend. 

Hands back in pockets. No more music from the fence -- you've passed it. It's just you and the ice beneath your shoes, which you normally revel in, but now it reminds you of her shoes, and your frozen heart, and you wish it were fall again, so your mind could dance on the wind with the leaves, instead of sitting frozen, stagnant in your head, burried in cold thoughts. 

Sounds intense. 

But you know it's just words. And your mind sits in your head, stagnant but plenty warm, your heart beats in your chest like it's always beat, though perhaps a bit faster because your feet can sense that you're almost home. You breath, watch your breath cloud, and that's all.