Post by Kuchen on Apr 5, 2011 18:04:01 GMT -5
Over the years, Esme had been accused of her share of personality flaws. Narcissism, co-dependency, arrogance, pyromania. Sentimentality wasn't among them.
Life was a numbers game. You roll a good number...and then again, sometimes you don't. Numbers couldn't be distorted. They either were in your favor, or they weren't. She found something kind of comforting about allowing her own life to be calculated, weighted and measured so simply.
The sum of a life.
18,396,000 minutes. Her life laid out like a long road, viewed through the eyes of a small girl with her face pressed against the glass pane in back of her parent's automobile. Flashes that rushed past before she could even recognize all the characters, let alone categorize them properly.
A child too young to know her parent's names, but smart enough to know the meaning of the word "hungry" could be modified with a creativity and big blue doe eyes that could get change out of even the most cold-hearted stranger. Wanting so much to be those strangers, wanting to feel nothing ever again but approval, adoration, silk skirts and the feeling of money in her hands.
A ratty haired little girl looking both ways before ducking down to shove a pair of ruby colored mary janes into her bag.
A teenage girl shivering in the front seat of an old black sedan, doing the figures of a month's worth of bank robberies and petty thefts in her head and calculating just how far they hadn't come.
And then there was a long aisle, a woman in a feathered white wedding dress tripping down toward her fate, allowing herself to believe, just for a fraction of a moment, that she was a real bride with a tenable future waiting for her once she stepped outside those vineyard gates. That they had a hummingbird's chance in hell of happiness or that under force, you could learn how to love someone more than you loved yourself. Someone sweet. Passive. Adoring. Absolutely unbearable.
Maybe he saw something in her that she didn't. Maybe he just had too much love and nobody else to give it to. Maybe she had just played that game too long, and worn out her luck.
King Saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong...but Jerome had just shrugged and walked the other way. What that meant to her, Esme suddenly realized she had never gotten around to calculating.
Well, damn.
Life was a numbers game. You roll a good number...and then again, sometimes you don't. Numbers couldn't be distorted. They either were in your favor, or they weren't. She found something kind of comforting about allowing her own life to be calculated, weighted and measured so simply.
The sum of a life.
18,396,000 minutes. Her life laid out like a long road, viewed through the eyes of a small girl with her face pressed against the glass pane in back of her parent's automobile. Flashes that rushed past before she could even recognize all the characters, let alone categorize them properly.
A child too young to know her parent's names, but smart enough to know the meaning of the word "hungry" could be modified with a creativity and big blue doe eyes that could get change out of even the most cold-hearted stranger. Wanting so much to be those strangers, wanting to feel nothing ever again but approval, adoration, silk skirts and the feeling of money in her hands.
A ratty haired little girl looking both ways before ducking down to shove a pair of ruby colored mary janes into her bag.
A teenage girl shivering in the front seat of an old black sedan, doing the figures of a month's worth of bank robberies and petty thefts in her head and calculating just how far they hadn't come.
And then there was a long aisle, a woman in a feathered white wedding dress tripping down toward her fate, allowing herself to believe, just for a fraction of a moment, that she was a real bride with a tenable future waiting for her once she stepped outside those vineyard gates. That they had a hummingbird's chance in hell of happiness or that under force, you could learn how to love someone more than you loved yourself. Someone sweet. Passive. Adoring. Absolutely unbearable.
Maybe he saw something in her that she didn't. Maybe he just had too much love and nobody else to give it to. Maybe she had just played that game too long, and worn out her luck.
King Saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong...but Jerome had just shrugged and walked the other way. What that meant to her, Esme suddenly realized she had never gotten around to calculating.
Well, damn.