Gothic Time
Fine lines had appeared beside moody eyes, eyes that for so long had consciously contrived to be wells of timeless, ageless despair, young eyes that knew their own mortality, the bittersweet beauty of Death known and welcomed . . . but she had comitted the Gothic sin of surviving young adulthood. Older, gentler eyes than hers, eyes that held the wisdom she at once claimed and despised, would smile at her, imagine that perhaps now, she might step laughing into the sunshine, fly a yellow daisy of a kite to float among the vast blue fields of skies . . . but all she knew was sorrow sought, the conscious preference for what was lost and unattainable, for despair and the stark comforting tombstones of those she had never known; light-hearted laughter and sunshine were both as foreign to her as she was to the fat white men on Wall Street who didn’t understand what was transient and what was inevitable. Oh, she knew color and laughter; her gray world was occasionally decked in the garish blood-red of a plastic ruby or self-inflicted wound, and she had been known to release a high-pitched, forced laugh in the midst of some equally garish drunken revel . . . but for the most part her world was one of black lips and black nails, gray skies and muted pressed flowers, a world in which the moon was seen only occasionally through the false lights of dark city streets and the sun was to be avoided at all costs--or at least bitterly complained of. She knew, in the wisdom possessed only by the very young and very morbid, that all things, however elegant or ageless, were at their hearts but garish imitations, nothing but theatrical productions on which the curtains would inevitably fall, the most beloved of props proven to be pasteboard and stored away amid dust and cobwebs until they would again be called upon to parade and dance in the glare of artificial lights . . . and for most of her aware, intentionally meaningless life, she had looked ahead to the welcome comfort of the approaching Angel of Death, the dark angel who would carry her away in a lover’s embrace to a reality darker still, where her perpetual depression would be justified by the sweet despair of the depths of reality.
But now . . . now . . . as she gazed into the heavily-framed mirror hanging on her wall beside the black background of a signed band poster depicting four sweet pale youths dressed in equally unbroken black . . . she saw in her eyes, in her skin, the incontrovertible proof that she at least was neither ageless nor timeless, that she was no longer truly one of the beautiful children of Death who danced and drank so furiously to suppress, however briefly, the fact of their own mortality . . . instead, she had the fine, almost invisible lines of a woman maturing . . . perhaps, beneath the layers of bleach and dye and henna, somewhere on her scalp a hair was even contemplating a silvery color change all its own . . . and yet she was alive. The Angel had not come for her. New children would be born, and laugh and cry and die . . . and perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . their lives would not be meaningless.
She choked, then, on that horrid, unbidden thought, fought it back, reached for the white powder and its little cottony puff beside her mirror that would hide away the telltale lines of survival . . . and another image crossed her mind, another childhood playthought, of a yellow kite flirting with cottony clouds in a vast blue sky . . .