HOME | DD

Description
She could have been a happy girl, with freckles on her face when you catch her in an unexpected laugh. She was a picture of childhood joy, eyes crinkled closed in a moment of pure and unscripted delight. But she was just that. A picture. You held it up to the real thing and it was always lacking, never quite the same in person as the glossy pages of the photo album that you held in your lap as a reassurance of the past...and as a false promise of the future.

She never looked the same as she did in that picture, never again. It's hard to imagine a time when that photo was real, hard to imagine that it's not some other girl who just looks the same. The same hair like a slash across her forehead, the same freckled face and the same thin lips spread wide, proclaiming her joy to all of the world. She is a little girl with a phone to her ear and her mother's red lipstick and she is happy. She was happy.

She doesn't wear red lipstick anymore. She doesn't wear any lipstick anymore, running a hand over dry lips, scrubbing back and forth as if to remove any lingering traces of a smile. She doesn't wear red lipstick and she doesn't look up to her mother anymore, doesn't look up to anyone, blinking her eyes slowly and deliberately as if every moment she spends with her eyes closed and protected in darkness, hidden from the world, is better than the many moments she has to suffer when they are open. It is as if that is the time that she savors, as she closes her eyes for just a moment, a brief respite before jerking back to reality again and again and again.

They look as if they have had all of the color sapped from them, her eyes. In the picture they sparkle, blue, like the pallette of sky seen by a child with her head in the grass, counting clouds and finding friends in their depths, white on blue. In person, they are pale. It looks as if it has been a long time since the time that that picture was taken and something has slowly lapped away at the color until it is now almost gone, a pale semblance of what it used to be.

There was something in those eyes that is gone, more than just a color. It was a sort a pure innocence, the type that they say children have. She has it, in the picture. It is because she knows that someone is taking a picture of her and she does not care. There is nothing going through her mind but her imaginary phone call and that red lipstick and that smile is the most genuine in the whole photo album, the smile of a child caught playing dress up. In the picture she dreams of the future and what it holds for her and what she will be and the life she will live.

Now she dreams of nothing. She dreams at night of flat darkness, extending beyond her, further even than what she can shut out by shutting her eyes. She dreams of being tired at the same time as she is resting. There is no rest. There is only each day, moving in a void, towards nothing, nothing at all. She closes her eyes when she dreams but there is no escape for her, not from her own world.

If the photograph is dropped, it will remain on the floor where it has fallen. No one has need for photographs of smiling little girls and it means nothing to them and she means nothing to them, means nothing to anyone. She is nothing, to herself even she is nothing, and if she is dropped she will remain on the floor where she has fallen. No one has need for girls who do not smile.