Stories under the Velvet Sky

Chapter One: By Omission

I’ve never been the most pleasant person to talk to. Hell, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the one person you’d want to avoid at all costs in the cafeteria, lest you damage your societal standing. Go on, shoo. Get away from me. Quickly, before the rest of the world notices that you’re here, talking to me.

Still here, aren’t you?

I guess I’ll have to talk to you now, won’t I? After all, it won’t do, to be so rude; to ignore someone who has so kindly taken time out of their day to speak to me. That would hardly be hospitable, wouldn’t it?

From the way you’re staring at me, so intensely, I can tell you don’t care much for my rhetorical questions. Though supposing you do, would you answer them?

I won’t hear them you know; I’m just text on a page, being written by a girl who has very little else to do with her very boring, very insubstantial life. I suppose if you really did care to answer, you could leave a comment.

I can’t see it you know. I’m an imaginary construct, a mere figment of your imagination. A fairy tale unfolding before you, the readers, to forever remain within the confines of this silly little book, as it were.

But suppose I were real: What would you do? What would I do?

To be honest, I have no real answer to that. I really and verily truly do not know what I would do. It is my fate to remain a player, forever acting upon the wooden page that my author has so readily set me upon. Together, the author and I, embark onto the perilous journey to explore what the world calls so inaccurately, the imagination.

And you, the readers, are to be mere observers; spectators of our travels.

Would it be too much to ask of you, to remain objective of my actions until the end of this tale?

I know; I know you’ve seen and heard it all. Every single possible retelling of this tale has been told to you before. Told so often that perhaps you’re tired of it; hearing these kinds of stories. You’re probably bored already, asking yourself, “How could she, a mere puppet, tell any kind of story worth reading? Especially this kind of disheartening, cliché, oft repeated trash.”

My answer is this: I don’t know. I don’t know if I will tell you of anything worth reading, if in the end, our journey will have been for naught, a disappointing end to a boorish novel.

But what I little I do know, I know to be true.

I know that in the end, it will have been worth it for me, to have told my tale to someone. Regardless of whether or not they were willing to listen to me, a fictitious puppet of someone’s daydreaming. I know that even if my story is boring, someone will have told it; someone will have read it.

That’s all I need to know.

Of course, you know that I know that I do not actually exist. I’ve told you that I know this. In essence, I’m breaking the fourth wall.

One could argue, however, that by expressing my thoughts and actions via this inter-dimensional transit that is the human imagination, I have come across a life; a will; of my own.

So, in the end, I suppose whether or not I actually exist is entirely up to you. Am I real, or am I not real?

I certainly don’t need you to tell me if I am. In my mind, I am as real as you. I am capable of thought, feeling, emotion, action, and foolishness. I am flawed, a being in my own right. I have beliefs and faith, trusts and betrayals, naïveté and foolishness.

I would say that I am just like you, but that is the one thing I know not to be true. If I were just like you, what I would be writing right now would be an autobiography, the tales of my life through my own eyes, biased, but based upon the facts as I know them to be true. The truth; from my perspective.

 Will you listen to it? In the end that is really all that matters, right now anyway. Will you continue to spend some of your time with me, to travel with me? To see my life as it has happened to occur through my eyes is by no matter an easy task. It will require you to do something that some of you have perhaps never done before.

You’ll have to pay attention to the page for more than twenty seconds.