…And so she sits…
She is fourteen years of age, approximately five-and-a-half feet, slightly slim (though with a stomach that has become slightly rounded from many years of indulgence), hunched over, with dark red glasses perched crookedly on her nose. Her hair up and hidden by a gray hood, she sits in a green wooden chair in front of a white, hand-painted desk, typing furiously on the laptop in front of her.

Beside her, a candle seems to flicker, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that it’s not actually a candle, but a battery-operated flickering light inside a tube of scented wax, bought for the girl by a mother who fears that her daughter’s clumsiness will cause a real candle to topple and damage her bedroom.

An involuntary chill, one of many, runs through her as she sits typing, straining her ears for sounds of the storm that is supposed to be raging outside. She smiles to herself, remembering that the storm was due much earlier in the day and that the students were let out three hours early in anticipation of it… Suddenly, she hears a great gust of wind and gets a small sense of relief; snow is coming after all, meaning that there won’t, for at least a night, be more of this dull grayness… At least the snow provides color and beauty, if not much else.

A window pops up in front of her; a friend is sending her an instant-message. She types back quickly, her hands skilled upon the keyboard. She has often said that they feel the most at home upon a keyboard, though she does not care whether it is attached to a computer or a piano. She knows she will write someday, knows already what she wants to do in life… A keyboard will be her working mate for many years to come; in fact, it already is.

Another window; a second friend IMs her. She responds with a response equally perky to her friend’s, feeling slightly fake as she does so. She loves her friends, but these conversations are so pointless, require so little effort… She can hold many at a time, and has—often.

Another chill runs down her spine, and she scratches her collarbone, savoring the feel of her nails against her skin. Since getting braces, she has been unable to bite her previously-butchered nails, and has allowed them to grow out once again. She has made many attempts in the past, but each time, she gives in and bites them once again; she hopes this will be her final attempt to give it up, the last time she is tempted to chew on them.

She pauses for a moment, debating what to do with the free evening she suddenly has. She is often bored, often filled with ennui, on nights like this; the constant draft in the house doesn’t help, nor does her empty stomach. She considers for a moment going downstairs to read a book, but she immediately remembers that the book she is thinking of is one she finished the day before. Now her shudder is in her mind, as she remembers the seemingly-unfinished, “bad guy gets the win”-type conclusion. This immediately reminds her of a reflective essay she has been meaning to write, pondering the idea that society is programmed to believe that the good guys always win. She remembers a moment just the other day when, while watching a movie, her sister says, “…I’m worried [the main character] will get hurt… But I doubt it, because he’s the good guy.” The comment had filled the girl with a small, slight sense of sadness; why must the good guys constantly triumph? Is it because when they don’t, whomever has written the story or directed the movie in which they don’t is immediately written off for writing a crappy ending, if only because their readers or viewers are so bothered by it?

She smiles to herself; she is ranting again—mentally, that is. She does that a lot; it’s a quality of hers that amuses her. She has friends who do it, too; she supposes great minds think alike.

And she does consider hers mildly great, if not completely undisciplined; her parents constantly encourage her, as do her teachers and friends. She has been complimented on her many talents often, and she has often worried that it is going to her head. In some ways, she believes it is most definitely, but on the other hand, how would she know about it if it was?

She sighs, determined now to leave the walls of her room and rejoin humanity downstairs. When left alone for too long her thoughts threaten to explode out of her head, not unlike a mighty river exploding through a badly-built dam… Her head, of course, is not a badly-built dam, but sometimes she feels powerless to stem the flow of ideas running through her brain…

The moment she thinks this, a slew of connections and metaphors come to mind; she smiles again, though now her head is starting to ache somewhat. She knows she must stop her fingers, knows that she has all the time in the world to write later on… And, with this thought in her mind (oh, lord, as soon as she resolves to stop, more come… And she feels so compelled to record them!) she stops typing, knowing that she’s doing herself a favor… Self-analysis is exhausting when done too much. And so she stops, and so she sits…