The Many Forms of I

Beautiful

Have fun! I was inspired by my friend's composition!

“She had been a beautiful woman.

“She had had hair spun from starlight, eyes woven of blue silk, and fingers slender and slim.

“She had also had legs longer than a swan’s neck, that had made her seem so very, very tall.

“Wherever she had gone, people had loved her, not just for her beauty, but also for her laughing eyes, her smiling mouth, the way she lit up every room she entered.

“Her mother was a simple woman, whose dreams amounted to no more than a big house at the top of the hill. Thus, when it was discovered that her daughter had a certain proficiency for medicine, she could not have been happier.

“However, her daughter had her own hopes and dreams. The runways of Victoria’s Secret had ever attracted her. The stunningly beautiful faces of the models on Vogue had only inflamed her passions till they pressed on her heart and clamoured to be released.

“She wanted, needed to be a model.

“Yet her mother took her firmly by the shoulders and turned her to Cambridge. There would be no runways, her mother had sternly told her. No, not for the girl who deserved so much more than that, she had said to the child, who had bowed her head in docile submission.

“Privately, she thought, ‘If she becomes a model, I’ll never get my big house at the top of the hill.’

“So she went to Cambridge and studied medicine under the iron fist of her loving mother, slept later and later, and dutifully recited the names of every known disease. She was happy, said everyone who saw her.

“The change came slowly, so slowly that they hardly realised anything had happened. It crept up behind the girl and grasped her with its cold, cold hands until the girl and her mother finally noticed that something was amiss. But it was too late, far too late.

“The hair lost its lustre, the shining eyes gently went dark. The smile gradually faded. Her back, once so straight and elegant, began to hunch from days of crouching over books detailing the human anatomy.

“No one spoke of another matter - one that only the girl, and the mother when she cared to look, knew of. In the corners of the girl's old bedroom, the dust was like a disease, slowly whispering through the corners of the room till it covered everything but the fingerprints – and the small wet circles, like dewdrops in the morning – on the cover of the old, faded Vogues.

“That was ten years ago. Now, if you go up to the big house at the top of the hill, you will find two women, one young, one old. It is hard to believe now that the girl once had had hair spun from starlight, eyes woven from blue silk, fingers slender and slim, and legs longer than a swan’s neck.”

I stared at my daughter, who had already fallen asleep. Gently, I smoothed the hair back from her smooth forehead and fingered the hair, silver like starlight. My hands rested on her cheeks, high and beautiful. I knew what I would see when she woke up – eyes woven from blue silk, eyes that I had had, once upon a time... Ah, such a long, long time ago.

I shook off the ugly memories and dressed, in my doctor’s coat, for work.

This is something I wrote for my English exam, but I added the part from 'I stared at my daughter..." onwards. So you know what I wrote! >.<