Building A Mystery

The Inspiration...

You come out at night
That's when the energy comes
And the dark side's light
And the vampires roam
You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith that died
Before Jesus came
You're building a mystery

You live in a church
Where you sleep with voodoo dolls
And you won't give up the search
For the ghosts in the halls
You wear sandals in the snow
And a smile that won't wash away
Can you look out the window
Without your shadow getting in the way?

- Sara McLachlan - 'Building a Mystery'

The Creation...

He is not easy to read and she never felt like she could get to him when it mattered. All the moments they had in between were just a few flashes of his indulgence of her and not dropping of the wall he had built to keep her out.

The Rules would have her not speaking her mind to him so she appeared mysterious but it wouldn’t work for two main reasons – he wasn’t her Mr.Right, secondly he wasn’t speaking his mind to her.

Just once and in half jest she remarked that she didn’t know why she still hung around with him and he looked at her in a cold, clear way and repeated the question-
“Why? Why do you really?”
She faltered then like she knew what he would say next…
Suddenly she didn’t want to hear another word; it was almost as if she was afraid of what he meant to say in answer to his own questions, as if somehow those would be the cement on the last brick that would put him in a room blocked from her.

Then a period of mellow happiness would follow, making her forget the dark clouds of his penitent moods that only she seemed to observe or acknowledge. He was unfailingly polite and cool to everyone. It was easier to prove that ghosts exist than to have someone else understand that he was not as well-adjusted and sure as he seemed to be.

He always had two other thoughts in his head concurrently with his inane general conversations and that he deliberately always never paid any amount of concentration to anything she had to tell him- personally, over phone or by mail.

Yet he kept coming back. He always called if there was a silence from both ends for more than a couple of days. The weekends were always together. Together but apart.

He instigated some changes in her that she didn’t like. She suddenly wanted to be small and lovely. So that she could affect him in some way, make him look at her, really look at her and see her. She wished that he would think of her, miss her or look forward to seeing her. She wondered if she really loved him, or if she just loved the idea of wanting all that she can’t have. Did she crave the masochistic pain of constant bereavement of something that never was?

Would she want him if he also liked her back?
Probably not, she decided. After all allure of the mystery lasts only a finite number of pages. Besides it would be genre clash to mistake suspense for romance.

Just like that, the furrows of strain on her forehead disappeared to non-existence and a new train of thought occupied the neural pathways - correct time to switch to non-fiction for a while?

my first fiction,
Rain