Chiaroscuro

          …In the sunlight everything comes alive, taking on a new dimension — that of a luminescent, other-worldly beauty, touched with a hint of something greater.  Those who pause are anointed, blessed - crowned with a sense of something liminal.  Sometimes I think it is this that drives us mad, those of us who can see.

          I would love to share this world with you, but you do not follow; you do not see.  You do not step out of the darkness to stand for one moment ringed in this beautiful agony.  I cannot say I blame you; sometimes it is too much for me to bear.  And yet - I always return to the madness, because it is there on the fringes that I am and feel whole — that I am alive.

          Knowing this, I cannot demand that you follow.  And I cannot help but understand why you don’t.

Kaila closed her notebook and sat gazing across the rippling pond, her mind not yet returned from the places it had been journeying.  Her hand unconsciously played with her pen, spinning it slowly in thoughtful circles.  Her posture gave the impression of one who was attempting to relax and be idle, but was not completely succeeding, partly out of a long-standing necessity to stay always on the brink of instinctual action.