writing_shadows

I remember meeting Rosalba for the first time. It was in London and I was asking about the seasons.

She was, I felt as I sat regarding her birch-paper skin and perfect teeth, and idly wondering if her bite was worse than her bark, a good advertisement for Spring. She was serene and lovely, a peerless object of desire; somehow innocent in spite of the world she lived in.

I was, of course, completely wrong about her.

As I came to know her better - although never well - I saw past the facade, as perfect as it is. I called her the devil once, in jest, almost as a compliment, and it cut her like a scalpel. I don't know, probably never will, what godawful things people have done 'for' her that she feels that way.

I apologised for upsetting her. She asked me: "Did I look upset." I had to tell her: "You always look upset." I realised then that I'd never heard her laugh, and I think that was when I stopped thinking she was such a fine example. A paragon, perhaps, but not an exemplar. Who, honestly, would want to be like her?

I can see what she's doing, I think, living for the desires of others, and it scares me. It scares me that anyone puts so little value on their own needs, their own wants.

I saw a tree once, a beautiful thing, well cared-for and tended. One day, a boy scrambled up into the big branches of the tree and one of them snapped clean off under his weight. He fell fifteen feet and broke his back. Hard to blame him when the tree looked so beautiful, so perfect to be climbed, so they blamed the tree.

Now, I'm sure the tree didn't mean to be that temptation. It had been planted to grow there, tended and trimmed to make it pretty to look at. It just so happens that it was a bad place for a tree, and as much as they forced it, it didn't have what it needed to live and be strong.

When they cut down the tree they found it was rotten all through, fit only for burning.

It scares me to think what she might be like inside.