She looked out over the vastness of the prairie, and felt the future calling her, in tantalizing tones and whispers of promise. To leave the past behind and start again, to feel the mountain breezes on skin that belonged to no one but herself. Heaven!
And in her heart began the idea, the merest fragment of a vision, of running. Running toward the hills, away from the little white farm house, away from responsibility and expectation, that weighed her spirit down. Why shouldn't she fulfill her destiny? Why shouldn't she be able to fly?
In her mind she packed her bags, threw her cares away, and fled. She ran down the sidewalk with never a care in her mind, and she boarded a bus, a plane, a taxi...anything!
Don't they say, “To thine own self be true?” Don't they say that I should be self-fulfilled? Countless people had told her, in story and song, that she should make sure she loved herself first, then she would have love to give other people.
Mesmerized by the hills and the prairie, enchanted by the waving freedom of the flowers around her, she began to walk. Away. Just away. She chanted to herself, in a quiet, rhythmic monotone, “to thine own self be true...to thine own self be true..” until the mantra seemed so true that nothing else could possibly hold truth..or exist...
And as she walked away, with the winds of freedom blowing her dress into billows, tiny feet ran to catch her. A little boy, with stubby legs that caught in the grass, desperately held out a flower, and rubbed at the tears streaming down his cheeks.
He could see the hands pulling his mother away. Gnarled hands. Old hands. Almost as old as the world itself. With blackened claws and soothing, intoxicating, rancid whispers...leading her to the what the world calls freedom.
With the strength of a hero and with the arms of true love, that is true to itself last of all, he grabbed her ankles and held. The forces that pulled her were strong, but the strength in his tiny heart was stronger still, and he held her until she fell, and could look down at him with angry eyes, that gradually became aware of everything around her, and then filled with the same tears.
She held her little son in her arms, and murmured nothings to him, as truth, real truth, seeped from his heart into hers, banishing the evil that had drawn her away.
This is a Thursday Tale, and the picture is from Junest at Deviant Art.
3 comments:
This fits very well with your theme for this blog. "No man is an island". I say: Love is stronger than selfishness, and certainly more rewarding.
I really thought she was going to somewhere where she wants to be but the second part of the story change all that, though I don't quite get the evil that is mention here, perhaps I'm not reading this right
This truly is a pervasive ideological infection:that are lives should be lived for ourselves. Society itself is built on mutual love, a revelation of all the higher religions, but modern philosophers call us to self service. Your sacrifices are not going unnoticed, and those that seek nothing but self pleasure will come to the end of there life and find they are empty and there life was meaningless.
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