Stitch.

[shadowbrides]

Author: Aerlinn
Title: Stitch. 
Characters: Andreth, to Finrod.
Text type / Format: ficlet
Source / Fandom: Silm
Rating: General
Warnings: the author loves metaphors too gd much. She is only mildly sorry.
Word Count: 381

Summary: The sentence ends in silence halfway through.

Author's notes: the author once again uses poor Finrod and Andreth to vent halfheartedly about her own issues with Meaning, and Life, and Death. As one does! But really; how infuriating to hear someone say your life is part of a greater harmony when none of yours forms much of one, Finrod. 

 

One day, he says, being trapped in Tale will drive all elves to despair. And I suppose perhaps if one remains it is easier to see the dots forming a long line, ever descending. You might draw back and retreat enough from the business of living to see Life; find something outside yourself. Lose your own living to it, from time to time. 

But, dear Finrod, most of us are not a line in a song, only a word, no less --a syllable. We moths! Not much more than a single stitch in a tapestry; brief flash of singed wing, all of life reduced to single dot. Avoid the fire and the powder on our wings wears off before the night is done; unconsumed, we lie dead at dawn even so, forgotten in some darkened corner. For you there is no escape from the song, for us none from silence.

And though my flash of colour might tell a larger tale to you seeing from afar, sorrow and beauty intertwined forever-- it tells no tale for me. The sentence ends in silence halfway through. All of us left behind in lives not large enough to contain or gain meaning that is ours alone, not as your Doom belongs to you. All our lives strung together like a string of vari-colored pearls, suffering slipping through your hands like water; but what of us? Empty oyster-shell. A single note, a cry in the night. Up close, nose pressed to the painting, all I see is red, even surrounded by your song. And so the vision remains a single smudge of where my lips touched, meaningless and brutish short; open ended, unredeemed, senseless, unchosen. 

It is easy to see a faces in stones and trees, if you look at them for a long time, from a long way off. But often it is only because that is what we expect to see. Who forces you to keep your Oaths? Who sings your Doom? Are you not the Speakers, the Singers on the Shore?

Is there a story? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps so long a life simply needs something to make sense of it, or go astray; so you say the stones are smiling, and scream belongs to song. But if you are flame, I am smoke.

Already I can feel the window opening. 

Comments

[hhimring]

You get a lot out of Tolkien's metaphors of the moth and the flame here!
That last sentence is very effective.

[shadowbrides]

thank you! I really do enjoy wringing Finrod and Andreth's moth- and flamespeak out for all they're worth. Finrod might just have been making a pun about his brother's name while talking about philosophy but Andreth for sure didn't let the opportunity slip and neither will I, hahaha.

[bunn]

That's very beautifully expressed, thanks for sharing it here.