#seraphina alyesbury

[altheaniann]

writing snippet #1

— seph has an existential crisis about love, which is not unusual.

love is dead: to begin with.

for all it matters, god is dead. sephi visits god every sunday despite her disbelief in him, and she visits him whenever the fancy strikes her. sephi whispers to god secretly, dialling his number on video call; one ring, two rings, three rings. god is busy. five rings, six rings, seven rings. god is not at home and if she keeps on calling him an ariana grande song will begin to play. sephi gives up, and decides that she will have a chat with god another day. so she waits for another day, preoccupying herself with various trivialities — nothing as important as trying to contact god — and bides her time. she talks to the skeletons in her closet. she ignores her mother. she decides that she currently feels like a balloon that once belonged to a child but has been accidentally let go of, so now she floats in the sky, abandoned, watching the birds as they pass, passing through the clouds, getting closer to the sun and causing damage to the environment. she drinks wine. she listens to billie holiday on vinyl. she longs to throw a tantrum the way that three-year-old spoiled children do when they are deprived of a toy that they deem a necessity; ‘it is not a want, it is a need.’ and when she is bored, when days and weeks and months have passed, she calls god again and is left on read.

so, she decides, god is dead.

or, maybe god isn’t dead. he just doesn’t love her, which is ridiculous because the holy scriptures claim that god loves all his creations equally. but sephi decides that god doesn’t love her; the signs were always there and she simply failed to notice them. or maybe she refused to notice them, refuses to notice them and shuns them into oblivion because she finds it more convenient to do so.

god isn’t dead, sephi decides.

love is.

“love is dead,” she tells him with the certainty of a philosopher who has just discovered the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. she says it as though it is some sort of revelation that has dawned upon her, like god has kissed her forehead and told her all the secrets of the universe: god isn’t dead, but love is.

love has never existed in the real world as far as sephi is concerned. she has read about it, seen films about it, heard about it in songs, but she has never believed it to be real. it is merely a lovely thought that people invented to convince themselves that something beautiful, something that means salvation, something that can atone and will atone a person, exists in a world dominated by war, cruelty and evil. love is a placebo for a person lying on their deathbed, dust bunnies masked as cotton candy, a salesman trying to pass off a copper and resin ring shined and painted in silver as a genuine cartier. love is tacky, love is plastic, love is what romance writers want you to believe in so they can feed you more lies and rob you of your money. love is a marketing scheme, a publicity stunt, a kiss and a stab packaged as one and tied together with a ribbon in a neat little bow.

love is the excuse that her father uses on her mother after stripping her bare and humiliating her in the way that malicious children torment baby birds who have not even opened their eyes.

“okay,” he says, vaguely amused by her conviction, “if love is dead, then what is this?”

ah, she hasn’t considered this. this is a mystery to her as she is probably a mystery to him. this is when her mind is an attic that is locked and its key thrown into the ocean, but he is allowed to glimpse at it through the keyhole, while others are forbidden to ascend the stairs. this is when he knocks on her door and she answers immediately, without hesitation, without doubt, without fear, knowing it’s him by the sound of the knock. knock, knock, twice instead of a set of threes. this is when he is a star and she is a star, and they burn brightly next to each other until their fires are extinguished, reignited, extinguished and reignited again. this is something indescribable, something tangible, something that truly exists and she has lived to witness.

whereas love is not.

love is dead: to end with.

#oc #oc writing #original writing #writing #stream of consciousness #sephi #seraphina alyesbury