Shannon Liao

written and illustrated by Shannon Liao as a space to show my work.

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I was creative lead for a team of graphic designers and fellow creatives at Marketers of Baruch, a nurturing bunch of professional hustlers, always ready to pounce on the next gig. These creatives included the talented Jay Romero who designed the logo, Naomi Gomez who made the second infographic, Arvis Chen and Urgan Chodon! I designed the copy for the infographic. 

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This little guy (and tub of gas) can be quite the gentleman, if you’d just give him a chance!...Oops, he didn’t mean to leak on the floor here. He swears he’s quite environmentally-friendly, although we’d take his claims with a grain of salt. 

Designed for Advertising Design Society at Baruch.

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Over an intensive one month campaign course, we worked in a team at Baruch College to produce an effective ad for Orbit gum, playing on the space theme of an orbit. 

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my time at vassar college

so I attended my local Vassar alumni event, and like all Vassar events it got me thinking. because really when I enter the environment of Vassar, a lot of elements that make up me start to feel displaced. I never really understood why I feel uncomfortable at Vassar College although I loved the friends I made and my amazing English professor who was extremely supportive. 

but like an invisible force was pulling me, I would always force myself to make eye contact with classmates, even brief acquaintances and draw upon whatever reserves of creativity I had to keep the conversation going. I would nitpick at every social encounter I had, praying people would like me and that whatever good first impression I had made could be preserved. I wasn’t the best student; more than half of my efforts were too busily concentrated on metamorphosing myself into a perfect social butterfly than getting straight A’s. 

i could never really discern what was making me uncomfortable. was it my status as one of the lone new yorkers attending the school, not from upstate, not from out-of-state? or was my social awkwardness yet again the culprit? 

but yesterday, as I slipped into my best blazer and Elie Tahari thrifted blouse, I was aware of a kind of code-switching I had to do for the first time in a while, switching into a code I’d never use at Baruch College or on the streets of New York City: I was pretending to be a well-off white woman. this itself is obviously, immediately a farce. I am as apparently East Asian as it gets. there is no disguising my ethnicity. but Asian Americans and whites have been intermingling in higher education for quite some time now, and there is a certain academic group of Asian Americans that is easily accepted into these predominantly white spaces that I could emulate so as to not appear threatening. I was bursting along the seams of it--my nails painted black and my eyeliner a little thick--but I was read like I wanted to be read: a burgeoning academic equipped with Mandarin and a fine knowledge of China. I didn’t hint at the last two parts...nowhere in the conversation did I say I was an expert on China, but it was already assumed before I had even spoken. 

okay, so I had most of it down. then what accounted for the discomfort and the obvious sagging of the facade? it was in the wrinkles of my leather pants, signaling that I had already worn the pair three times that week, in the manner that I gulped down the chicken Caesar sandwich, in how I only attended the last session ($20) so as to avoid paying $60 for all three sessions, in my 45 minute commute from Queens, expressed in my inability to speak on travels to Europe, Korea, and Japan, in the white splay of unclaimed name tags of people who paid for the event and didn’t bother to show up, all over and too explicitly made in my decision to transfer out of Vassar at the end of my freshman year to attend a city college. if white people made it an etiquette rule long ago not to talk about money, what do they do when I bring it up directly? avert their eyes and change the subject.

and now I had finally come to the heart of it, the obvious truth of the matter striking me bluntly in the face. I had always been an outsider at Vassar in many more than one sense of the word. in my chosen profession of novelist, i don’t even need to attend a day of college to qualify, and people have never failed to comment on that fact to me. I don’t need to be here, they’ll tell me, writing is something you can do straight out of high school, as if a college degree hasn’t become the absolute norm. and again at this alumni event, I have voices from Buzzfeed, NBC News, and the New York Times, telling me this, up close and personal now, “Why are you here, asking me questions, when clearly you’re not interested in our fields?” What they really mean to say is, why am I bothering them at all, when there are far more real Vassar students who need their help and can afford it. 

I used to look back on my time at Vassar fondly, longingly and sought any way to climb back to that esteemed institute. But I have had to remind myself that, as with all things, my imagination makes things better than they are.

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april and astrid excerpt

Most girls get to see their moms as that soft, adoring, maternal figure. But from a young age, I was already seeing my mom on stage, in film, encapsulated as the sexed up April Wong. She was tasteful about it, always, but the media did not pay her the courtesy sometimes. They saw her as exotic, merely because her skin tone, her eyes, and the overarching heritage she had been born from was different, even though she spoke that accent-less, perfected English of the acting persuasion. This image of my mother was hammered into my impressionable mind, both as an idol and an enemy. It haunted me, this standard I had to live up to, beginning even before I had seen the first spots of blood on my underwear or the first growth of breast. It was an invisible devil that pursued me, as much as I pursued it, until we were wrapped together, inextricable. I wanted to be April Wong, I already was April Wong, I was her daughter and her mother and her lover. But most of all, I was her killer, because the more I grew and the prettier I became, the more life I took away from her and the more she withered. These days when I glance at my mother only casually, her lined face and thin lips are what strike me. Well, I tried to live up to her, infinitely so, as may be apparent by my long list of conquests and those silly little stage plays I performed in at school. Each time I auditioned, I hid it from my mother, because I did not want it to be as if I were doing it for her, although all the while I was. Then when I was called back for a second audition, I painted it as the night I stayed over my boyfriend's house, a.k.a. the night my mom believed I lost my virginity, although said occasion had already occurred two years prior. I returned home fresh-faced and perky, more than I had been in a while, and there is something to be said for genetics, for I love acting too much like my mother does for it to be a coincidence. It lights something within me, that had been there all along but whose presence had dimmed along the years. It awakens a spirit that I had known long ago and reunites me with that long lost friend. In acting, I can escape my present situation and pick up the burdens of someone else. In doing so, I extend my being, grow more selfless and gain vision. They gave me the female lead, a punk rock, do-or-die femme fatale who would rather get high than listen to some man. Some of her lines made me laugh, but I felt we were kindred spirits at the heart of things and that I could get along with her for years. I had to sing and dance in the part, but although I was mediocrely passable at both, I somehow muddled through. The male lead was gay which somehow made all of my scenes with him better. I didn't need to worry about anything forming between us, considering I was still seeing someone else at the time. Everyone liked my performance and the director suggested I go to acting school for college or at least pick a fun liberal arts school where I could major in theater and mess around. But all along, I couldn't shake the feeling of April Wong following me, pinned to my back like a snake, tightening its grip around my throat, until I would run off the stage during breaks, unable to stand it anymore, heaving and sweating, staring at my reflection in the grimy bathroom mirror in distress, my dress shirt resting unflatteringly on my hips. I hate doing things for other people. That's one of the fundamental quirks about me that guys come to either laugh about or simply hate. It's why my mother writes angry letters to my dad when she thinks I'm not paying attention. It's why my gym teacher wants to fail me but she's not really allowed to. Acting could be, and should've been, something I did all for myself. But because I felt my mother in all my actions, and because her prickling presence was driving me up a wall, I couldn't go through with it. It was a shame, even I thought it was a waste, because it was the one thing I had a real talent for, one that, tempered with work and training, could have become a career, especially with my mother's fame aiding me. But perhaps because of that, because of how easy that was, and how reliant I'd have been on my mother, I refused to do it.

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Her words were swift and decisive, and they cut right to his heart. If he had one, he mused, knowing that such metaphysical ideas didn’t really exist for him anymore. What was a heart anyway, when his organ was plagued with constant pains so often that he might as well turn the whole thing off? “We should break up.” She had never said that before, had never even hinted that there was a problem. He had thought they had been perfectly happy—no, at least content, with one another. They ate their meals together and he took her to a movie every couple of weeks. Sex was every Friday night, and they texted each other regularly. She nicknamed him Darling~<3 on her phone and he had her saved as Babe. That was what a relationship was, after all, right? What more could a person ask of him anyway? She was about to tell him, it seemed. “We never had anything in common,” she said, her gaze not meeting his. Something about the way she tucked a strand of dyed red hair behind her ear already felt aloof. It was as if she had already rehearsed this ending, practiced saying the words with absolute finality, listed all the reasons in her head. All without yet saying a word, until now. “I like books, yet you like…” She trailed off, apparently not being able to find a hobby to list. She pursed her lips. Her boyfriend never really did anything with all his spare time out of classes. Now that he had graduated last spring, the time feast compared to her time famine was even more glaring. She wanted to be charitable now, that all their good times (and pretty mediocre) times were coming to a definite conclusion, but her words failed her. Computers. That was right. He liked those, didn’t he? But he had never done anything with his passion for constantly trading a model of a phone or laptop off for an “upgrade,” which really was an euphemism for trading a quarter for two dimes. He had failed out being a computer science major, and no major tech company wanted to hire him. Nor was he even able to fix her brand new printer that was missing a cable. His hobby of making YouTube videos, that had gone nowhere, too. She let the sentence die halfway on her lips, not bothering to finish it. It was better off left unsaid. His eyes widened. That was her excuse? It seemed so flimsy, so irrational in light of all the cozy nights they had spent together and romantic movies they had seen. Weren’t they in love? Did that mean nothing to her now? “I just…” She struggled with the words now, knowing how they sounded. “Need to find someone with more in common with me. Someone who will actually read the drafts I write and help critique them, without mocking me. Someone who doesn’t…” She bit off the end of her sentence. Someone who doesn’t speak and write with terrible grammar, she finished in her head. “Please understand,” she said weakly. But the words did not reach him anymore. She stared at him hard now, determined not to let a tear leak out. She had already thought everything out. They would be happier if they weren’t together. He needed someone more supportive than her, that was for sure. Someone who didn’t regard everything in life with a status, an automatic winner versus loser binary she possessed that shunned many and kept her isolated. And in turn, she needed someone who would understand her, and comprehend who she was as a person and what her art meant. She needed that comprehension. She craved it. “Aren’t you just looking for a clone of yourself to date?” He blurted, before he could stop himself. “Huh?” That was so out of left field, she didn’t know how to respond. A clone of herself? Was that really what she had been describing in her mind, in her dreams of her ideal man? “Yeah,” he said, feeling his side of the argument pick up momentum. “All those qualities, like being able to read well, aren’t those just things you already have? Why would you want a copy of yourself?” Another human being able to read and appreciate literature wouldn’t be a replica of herself, she wanted to reply indignantly, but stopped herself. She just didn’t care enough to fight back. She had won every argument they had had in the past year. Why not let him have one last hurrah before the end? What did it hurt her, anyways? She walked upstairs to her room and retrieved her luggage, moving swiftly past her distraught former lover. Feelings die when they’re not watered enough. There wasn’t anything to do about it, really.

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dust to vapor

metaphoric

metastasizing

on the edge now

tipping slowly over

like a glass shot at the wrong moment

the moment before it leaps over

crushed.

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time

time seems to operate on a different level when i’m with you. on the kind of slippery, floaty level that you can’t grasp solidly with your fingertips, but that pulsates away from you and speeds up, spins up on a whim

and slow, drag, pull, when it gets in a tizzy. you have to wonder, is it you or me? or is the smoke that envelops us, clouds us, moves us and accentuates our curves and farts? weeks slip by, like gleeful fugitives. months hurl by, easy as the flick of a lighter, as the click of ignition of a smooth motorcycle.

soon the cinders of summer are at our feet, too accustomed to gravity to offer much resistance to the elements. and we are all but consumed, neglectful of our wounds, unkind to change.

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Taiwan and New York are two different sides of a spectrum so separated by time and space. In New York, there is vivacity and color on the trains, age and rot on the tracks. There is public love, so public we avert our eyes and question their propriety. In Taiwan, there is proper fashion and skinny girls in knee socks and too short skirts with buttoned up blouses. There are winter coats, yes, but for fashion’s sake. There is country twined Mandarin in gruff and loud tones and tattooed eyebrows and old style perms. There are too low ceilings and a penchant for saying thank you. There is hand holding. In New York, there is full on making out and legs crossed over lovers. There are winter coats, thick and burly black. There are black models on advertisements for mainstream brands. The subway train is wide and the track is slow and unreliable. There is constant communication between the conductor and her passengers, informing the latter that they are running late once again. There is the chilling cold and the snow both beloved and accursed. We are wanderers in the night sky, drifting aimlessly until we collide with others, different minded, who implode our inner values and birth reinventions of our minds. This chemistry, this outpouring of energy is what defines continuity and progression in the best of ways, granting us comfort at the lowest of lows and melodic assurance at our best. Your lips land on mine, declaratively, boldly, in a sweet and adoring manner that I replay and revisit in the coldest of mornings when paperwork and confused patients plunge me asunder. Your palm, giving my back warmth, rubbing circles where I felt alone, as if lighting little marker places for where I should be and where I was and where I am now with you. In my pitch dark, hazy comfort, those lights place me in a realm of sanity again. And all along the way, I was scared. Scared of the dark, of the monsters that laid along the lines of my thoughts and the very real places they could drag me to. I was terrified by their wrapping and twisting tentacles, their penchant for lying viciously, extremely so until I could barely see them at all and then sinking their jaws in when I grew absent minded. To myself I have always been a danger, an addled mess of flammables just waiting for the wrong trigger. But thinking of you now reassures me, warms me and recharges me, so that the bitter cold is nothing but a phantom breeze and my pounding headache is nothing but a slight tickle and together we are impermeable, a solid entity, fixed in time and space, lovingly.

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The waves are crashing in and all around her She bites her lip, relishes the sensation And soon, all too quickly, it’s already fading from her grasp Her hand reaches out as if looking for a lost lover Caressing a ghost, a shell, a dying breath before she thinks about it too hard

Here in the bathroom, where I see three of myself, I see myself bent over my knees Clutching onto consciousness, but still deeply in love with life Pleased with the moment, I carry on

In the dark art basement, already abandoned We all see circles within circles Heaving, wheezing, bent unto ourselves Contemplative within ourselves and doubting that anyone else can understand How can anyone feel this gaping hole, so real underneath this shirt So bloody and so gritty already, but invisible to the touch and to the feel

I am here and I am not I am moving, flowing into and around myself, the waves are inside me already Pulsating with the fruit of energy Alive, and ticking with fury And my vision is closing in on myself, buried already within Seizing into myself, biting into myself This vicious merry-go-round feels like too long a ride

[writeworld-blog]

Where did she get that necklace?

Writer’s Block

In one sentence is the spark of a story. Ignite. Mission: Write a story, a description, a poem, a metaphor, a commentary, or a memory about this sentence. Write something about this sentence. Be sure to tag writeworld in your block!

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She walks down the aisle, all calm and collected, with a blue teardrop down her chest. We are all eyes, watching, feeling vengeful, writhing spirits of the masses unable to sate our angry hunger. It’s a choker, melded into a long pendant, with a lapis lazulis gem at its core, and there was only one in the world prior to this morning. Now she has set that question spinning in our minds because where could she have gotten that necklace? Nowhere, except if she had sunk her arm deep into the folds of the earth, and pulled. We had all thought her a shady individual, one who would rather leap through alleyways than walk down the street in sunlight like any law abiding fool. Her hat shop she ran with the strangest efficiency—anyone who walked in could expect to lose a solid three hours of their life there, perusing hats of every kind, wondrously tall ones and ones that glimmered in the night. Yet those who visited her shop came out unchanged, completely remaining suspicious of her and never having a good word to say about her. It would be as if those three hours of their lives they had deposited at her doorstep were separate and alien to them now.

So to watch her stride past us, the gem sparkling on her bosom, was to cast her in a new light entirely: grave robber. And as much as we balled our fists and clenched our jaws, we were powerless to interfere. She walked on, dress trailing in the dim light, a specter in her element, fading into the mist.

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Ueda looked up from his newspaper in surprise. “You what?” He muttered almost reflexively, not meaning the words.

“I love you.” April insisted, her right arm flung out in sincerity, not even parody of the way she would fling apart on stage.

There was an ignition in her gaze, between her fine mascara and opulent dark pupils. Immediately he recalled nights after nights of sipping whiskey beside this woman that was at once his best friend that he bared all to but concealed what was most important from. He remembered being at the very edge of blacking out and still resisting the confession, withholding it with every pulse of his heated temples. “I’ve loved you for months now,” she spoke carefully, each word accentuated in her silken voice and held preciously on her tongue.

There was a pregnant silence that met her words until he moved a mouth that felt leaden. “I would be the absolute worst person for you.” April laughed, “I know what serves me well. And I simply had to tell you, it’s been haunting me.” She took her seat beside him at the breakfast table, pulling the newspaper easily from his grip. “I knew you’d never admit it on your own.” April continued. “At first I couldn’t be sure of your feelings, but then last night when you stopped in the doorway...well.”

Ueda groaned, burying his head in his hands. It had been the tiniest slip, the smallest abnormality that foretold his doom. He had paused in that doorway, staring at her batted eyelashes, that crystalline smile, and a glamour that had entranced thousands but was an honest creation. And he had let his gaze, containing those pools of emotions, wander, loosening his guard for mere seconds. It had been, now he knew, enough indication for her to act on. He had known the two of them were bound to one another. He could not escape her and never had he wanted to. But now his incompetence caught his eye, his over love of whiskey and lack of progress with his music. His petty addictions and character flaws, which were simply awful for any woman to tolerate, would be hell for her. And it would be a hell she would bear with perfect good manners, silently with a smile. He said nothing. “Ueda, since you won’t speak, I’ll say the words for you. You love me back. More than you loved her or the woman before her. And you need me. Our bond is one that surpasses our petty significant others, our friends and family. It’s a clear cut love, that I’m sure you’ve noticed too,” April vocalized his feelings, in a calm tone that conveyed nothing but emphatic warmth.

He remained startled, taking in the vision of her dark dress, pale skin, those scarlet lips and bold black nails. She looked...agitated, contrary to the vibe she might have been attempting to achieve. Which meant that despite how confident she was trying to sound, she really was uncertain about the depth of his feeling for her. Ueda’s analysis took only the better half of a minute as he swept through the classifieds. He concluded that as much as she was trying to corner him into admitting his feelings, there were a few other alternatives that still remained open to him. Almost as if springing into flight, his mind entered the scenario where he denied her. She would place distance between them, she would seize her acting projects and dive head long into them without speaking to him for weeks. If he asked her about them, she would be an impenetrable wall; she would look at him as to a stranger, regard him in her eyes like a speck of dust; warmly, considerately, devoid of attachment. Conversely, he would roam downtown at night, drive his beat up car into the district for one sole purpose. He would bed strange women, with their hair just slightly the wrong shade, their lips too bright and their gaze too strong. Maybe one of them would strike up an interesting conversation if he were lucky and for a few brief moments each night he could hit an oblivion high that blacked out the ceiling and sent sparks down his shoulders and into his jowls. And the hole in his chest would rupture, harder yet, and he would worry alone, endlessly. He would lay, naked on the floor of his apartment, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. He would lay there and feel himself breathing still and be amazed. Then, like on an alternative alley, with well-plucked roses and whistling cherubims, he considered admitting everything to her. His mind drew a blank; his imagination simply fizzing away, shrinking at the multitude that could occur. There were simply too many possibilities and the question laid too open-ended. Only an unnerving fear consumed him in the moment, wringing his innards and robbing his breath. “Ueda,” April’s tone was plaintive,” Ueda, just admit it.”

His eyes met her gaze and he faltered. His brows rose and his chin trembled. “I-I...”

His words, whatever they would have said, were snuffed out by her mouth on his, she leaning over the counter to reach him, seizing his chin within her grasp. Her tongue, wet and insisting on his mouth, distracted him from further doubts. He felt himself hardening. “I can read you,” she said, by way of explanation. “So you don’t have to say it now if you’re not ready.”

He found it ironic that she, who was acutely aware of his entire sexual and romantic history, and knew just how many women he had had, could say something like that with a pure expression. He almost laughed. “All experience you’ve had is negligible,” she said, in harmony with his thoughts, “because those experiences weren’t with me.” She walked around the counter, closing the distance between the two of them.

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She rests her head by the curve of his shoulder, nestling into it.

The room is dimmed so that only two figures clutching to each other remain aware of the other’s proximity and warmth, in a stretch of darkness.

Softly, mutedly, she feels him tracing the outline of her spine, his long fingers fluttering in the void. She presses her lips to his skin, thanking him silently for the past few days. Crickets hum on in the distance, then quieting in the breeze.

--

The next day in class, her mind is fixated on him. As her pen scratches her notepad, she remembers running her fingers through his hair, tugging at it with a silent demand. 

The wind scatters her place in the book and as her fingers press against the paper, the dry surface rubbing against her fingertips, she wants to reach out and feel his skin against hers, forceful and consummated. The teacher makes eye contact with her briefly as he lectures about Venus and the ideals of beauty and lust. For a moment, she shivers, his words echoing her thoughts too closely.

“...sometimes you have to make yourself vulnerable to a person and trust in the commonality that you share. That you are all so vividly human, so brokenly so, which makes you love life and love each other and so that makes it worthwhile.”

The professor is outright rambling and yet, she thinks she has not heard truer words in a long time. Again, she remembers his warm embrace and falling asleep more contentedly than a babe in his arms.

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noir

Something disquieting crawled up her spine just then, as the shadows unfurled themselves around her.

There was something distinctly unsettling about how dark the sky was at only four in the afternoon and how burdened the gray streaked clouds were, given the arid air.

She wanted nothing more than to hurry home and bury her head in sheets that smelled of lavender incense and vanilla perfume, but she had six more hours on her watch. Or the best word for it was a watch, because she had planted herself in front of six monitors and three keyboards, all of her devices pinpointed on a tiny speck of existence she could barely call real.

The large, elongated hall was devoid of human forms, only a wandering cat bathed in black and her.

Her eyelids drooped, folding into folds of folds.

The static on her headphones grew sharper and more clean.

Her blue eyes looked black with the reflection of the screens and her skin a grayish undead.

Suddenly, he woke.

A bird-like cawing, a stretch of his spindly arms, the knocking of his soft black pillow to the ground, and he was up; a flicker of movement on her screens.

Then she was sending him messages, each more hastily composed than the previous. They flew at him, buzzed at his mind, yapping at his attention.

Her antennas pointed, she zoomed in on his face. His gaze was steady, lips unpressed. She ran three full body scans at the order of an easy keystroke and the result was almost instantaneous:

he was unreadable.

She did not despair, her fingers working in the hood of night like skaters gliding carefreely. They romped through QWERTY and the number pad, the sounds of their tapping growing more urgent by the millisecond.

Each time she was calling at him, the phrasing would be a little different, sometimes more furtive, sometimes outright naughty. She peppered her words with bold emojis, the top ten most flirtatious. Most of all, she punctuated her communications with a full body scan a piece. Each delivered her a trying blow--he was unreadable, he was emotionless, he was absolutely platonic--but she wished to see the matter to its end.

The missives were cut into three words each, she beginning to use every variant of confession she could find. “I love you” was simply too forthright but any alternative spelling was safe enough.

Her alarm startled her out of her reverie, ringing its quiet but insistent one-tone. It was a warning that he had left the room with all of her cameras, all of her carefully set-up wires.

Right outside the room, there he stood, just a few hundred feet away from her.

His physical form floated toward her, swarming into her vision and yet eluding it.

She abandoned her keyboards and monitors and ran toward him.

Her infirm body tottered as she rose to her feet and she stumbled into the mist that was him and was not. He simply evaporated before her, a hazy tone of pale flesh and black hair.

She stuttered the words she had typed relentlessly, over and over until the keys had imprinted themselves into her core components. They seemed lodged in her, like little bits of wood and metal drifting aimlessly.

Deaf and formless, he did not see her, yet she clung to the memory of him, sinking into her weakened knees and embracing him so tightly she was hugging herself. There she collapsed until morning.  

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rococo

She plants the garden full of supple fruits and winding stairways. The apples of her cheeks are blooming, as is the heat of her chest as her heart shudders. All along the high line, her dress flows, delicate and fluttering in the summer breeze.

Almost as if by cue, as his heels click against the stone path, she turns, a broad smile across her lips. Her dark hair, curled and layered in a calculated careless manner, shifts in her step, falling down a shoulder, covered by lace and silk. Her teeth, polished, look simple and neat against her pink tinged lips. Her hands are held at an angle with her waist, held just so, and her fingers are outstretched, as if waiting for something to hold.

Her pace quickens as she closes the gap between them. Then she slows, subtly, determined not to be the first to end the distance.

He greets her dutifully and she can’t help but see the slight flush of his cheeks as he says her name, caressing the syllables with his tongue. She can’t help but see the nervous way he shuffles his feet, his polished leather shoes, and how he pulls at his consummate tie.

Her mind floods with the buzzing of the many clues that divine his desire for her. Then the pyramid she has built, the pyramid of cards that she has so decisively set up, topples under her doubt.

She watches the scene unfold in her mind’s eye, this time situated several paces away. He greets her, and this time, all the clues are absent. His gaze is friendly enough, platonic, lacking any romantic feeling.

And she snaps back to attention, staring at the mosaic that rests in front of her, such a well-assembled pack of half-truths, assumptions, and lies.

She opens her mouth, summoning up her feelings for one final analysis before she lays herself bare. Then she finds her own catalog of senses befuddled, her vision dimmed in the shroud of uncertainty.

“And tomorrow, they’ll paint the gates a new bronze,” he is telling her. Her lips slide shut once more as her mind grasps his words.

“That is so very lovely,” she adjoins, her mind a fugue. She decides in the moment, with great reluctance, to shelf her confession for the time being. So much rests on her deciphering the few and broken clues, and how ill-prepared she is to do so.

If only the wind could howl fiercely in that moment, so that she could cry aloud, “I love you!” and he could choose to hear her or not. If only the ocean was not thousands of miles away, so that it could drown her words on her lips, and preserve their great friendship of eight years.

How she loathes living in this isolated castle, this garden without a flowing stream this very second; how there appears no worse a fate.

Her stomach drops to her feet, and her insides receive a painful tug.

“Was there something you wanted to tell me?” He questions her now, his husky voice too close to her ears, too intimately attuned to her thoughts and, yet, still an island away.

She pauses in her survey of the garden, one heel resting against the other. She draws a breath, and the world suspends, the molecules of air intently alert. “Oh,”

The wind is shrieking in her thoughts and the ocean has sent wave after wave crashing into her garden, wrecking it asunder, in her quasi dreams.

Her chuckle is almost bitter, and her eyes look pityingly up at him before she speaks.

“No. Nothing at all.”