Yesterday, when I was supposed to be doing homework, this came to mind, based off of a scenario I encountered while walking to dance a few hours earlier (as a disclaimer, I didn't really witness a car accident. I just watched another car back up alarmingly close to another. I also have no idea who the people were the in the car.) You could say that this girl is a fictionalized version of me, and you could also say that the only difference is our appearance. Whatever you make of it, though, my intention was basically to just try to write like Victor Hugo, because his style is so unique. So this is me, pretending that I'm him. There might be more to come, but I won't know it until I see it, so this is all I wrote yesterday.
October came swiftly, and it found Melena sitting in a courtroom.
It was no matter of chance for her being there, yet she had committed no crime. It’s unclear at the present, but as the story progresses we’ll see that there is no way for our protagonist to be found on a trial of her own, at least not in any logical setting. She was far too conventional, the quiet and law abiding student in a class of crowd pleasers, whom one usually finds in a corner, reading a book. There may have been a place in her heart for romanticized rebellion, but her brain was much too dominant to let it get too out of hand. To tell the truth, in her hometown, it wouldn’t be terribly uncommon for child of sixteen to be on trial, but Melena simply wasn’t that type of person. So what was she doing in a courtroom?
The case was simple and trifling: it had been a few weeks earlier, when fall was just starting to sneak its way into the air. Melena was walking her daily route on the side of the road after school let out one afternoon when she came across a crosswalk, blocked almost entirely by a car. Upon seeing her, the vehicle began to back up out of the crosswalk, without gauging the distance between itself and the car behind it, committing the mistake we all dread and cross our fingers against. Horns blasted, metal scraped and small bits of glass fell to the ground, while Melena stood wide-eyed on the sidewalk. Despite herself, she laughed a little, thinking of herself and how the anxiety that filled with car when she drove, because of situations like this. Then she hurried into the street to help, because there was no way she could simply walk away after witnessing that.
Nobody was hurt in the accident, but insurance companies were disgruntled. The front car had been driven by a woman by the name of Elizabeth Fox, who worked for a bank in town and was known for always being in a rush. Being an economically savvy woman, Ms. Fox jumped to find ways to fix the back of her car that didn’t involve spending a fortune. The other driver, on the other hand, was a young mother named Lucy Button, whose toddler son had been riding with her, and whose vehicle suffered considerable damage. It was the classic case of unnecessary lawsuits: if Ms. Fox had simply agreed to pay the sum needed to fix Mrs. Button’s car, the problem would be solved and everybody would go on living happily. But she was adamantly against it, and thus a trial was born. Lucy Button, intimidated by Elizabeth Fox’s overbearing and confident demeanor, raced to find the girl who had been at the crosswalk at the time. Melena had mentioned her first name in passing as she helped the little boy out of the car, and after that it wasn’t too difficult to track her down at the school. She agreed to be a witness, if nothing else because she could see the worry in Mrs. Button’s eyes, and understood how important it was. She was the only one who had been on the street at the time, and Elizabeth Fox was a prominent figure in the community, whereas Lucy Button was young and new to the area. Also, it goes without saying that Melena was an overall well-meaning girl.
In order for the rest of the story to go on, one must understand Melena, especially since she was commonly misunderstood. She was fair-skinned and blue-eyed with light brown hair, an average character in an average storybook. The question of her beauty was what kept her up at night staring into the mirror, what made her shy away from mirrors and duck from cameras. Her parents loved her, without a question, and were constantly telling her that she was gorgeous, but any person knows that that is simply the job of a loved one. Despite her doubts, though, the girl seldom let it get to her. She was far too preoccupied with the rest of her life, and the opportunities to glance into a mirror became less and less frequent. Vanity, after all, is a quality of the bored.
She was in her eleventh year of schooling, and working harder than she ever had before. If she had time, she would pause occasionally and remark, “it’s as if I never stop doing everything!” Indeed, she didn’t. Her days were filled from the moment she got up to the seconds before she turned out the light for the night, and only then did she relax in the stillness of the night, praying to drift off to sleep and not be plagued with insomnia. At school, the teachers gave out more work than they ever had before, and she would spend hours throughout the day filling in the gaps of time between events to make sure everything was completed. From the moment she got up, her eyelids would feel heavy, and the sensation would last until she laid down to sleep an eternity later. In the monotonous hours of school, particularly in the afternoon, the room might begin to feel almost too peaceful, and she would lay her cheek down on her desk for a while, before jolting herself back up in order to copy down something from the board or go on the next activity.
As only the most dedicated will know, along with the gain of discipline comes with loss of freedom. It didn’t take long for her to find that shamelessness was quickly slipping out of her fingers. When one spends all of her time working, the concept of being idle becomes more and more abstract. If she finished her work and still had time to enjoy, she would stare at her notes and exclaim, “Can it really be?” Most often, she didn’t believe herself. Even the simple act of reading a book or jotting down a story came with guilt. The clock became her constant companion, always keeping track of the seconds for her. There was never enough time in the day, she realized.
In her allotted spare time, she might seek solitude in her bedroom, where she struggled with the concept of musicality, disagreeing with her violin over and over as she tried to coax the right sound out of it. Metronomes would tick, pencil marks would be made, notes would slide out of tune and she would eventually get so frustrated that her fingers would begin playing old pieces rather than the task at hand, just because they were more pleasing to the ear. Yet it was during this time that she was able to slip into a different sort of dimension, where the music was simply background noise for her thoughts. She encountered the same feeling during ballet class, where she would stand at the barre contemplating her life’s decisions, while raising her leg in a grand battement, the ballet mistress clapping her hands to the rhythm of the music behind her. She stumbled across it while she was cleaning the house or washing the dishes, when the job becomes mere busywork and the thoughts of the doer are the most important thing in the world right then.
Paused, with a dripping plate in her hand, she would stare ahead and say to herself, “Is it all worth it? Is it really?”
But the most important thing to know about Melena is that, to her, it absolutely was. More accurately, she loved it with a passion. Boredom had always been her most terrible enemy, and she could never stand the feeling of not learning anything. “I feel like I’m losing brain cells,” she would complain during the summer months, where the sunlight constantly shone in through the window and the days were completely up to her. Business was what preserved her sanity, what made her more grateful for times of quiet and peacefulness, and what she felt defined her. “I wouldn’t be happy without all of these things that make me what I am,” she told herself. “If I were to give one of them up, I would be giving up a piece of myself.”
And behind all of that, there was so much more to the girl. She was a lover of stories, and was never without one in hand, whether it was something she was reading or something she had created herself. She sang when she thought nobody was listening (unless she was in the company of her family, to whom she subjected countless songs). She read the tales of fellow people around the world and imagined what the rest of the planet must look like. Her walls were papered with maps. She listened to politics and discussed current matters with those who would listen. Suppertime in her family was always a lively event, with some sort of debate going on about something somehow relevant. Logic was her good friend, except for the cases where she would throw it out into the cold and completely turn her back on it. She was polite to adults, comical with the right sort of people, lively with her friends and sweet with younger children. If she were to come across herself described in a book, she wouldn’t recognize herself. Yet this was undeniably how she was.
That is all we will say about the life of Melena, for the time being. It’s inevitable that she will become more and more apparent as the story goes on, but that is for her to show us when she feels it necessary.
I just have to say, I read this story over and over and I love it every time.
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