Candlelight

Posted on 28 Apr 2013 @ 2:54am by
Edited on 28 Apr 2013 @ 3:11am

1,899 words; about a 9 minute read

He is a Vulcan. He cannot not feel the same way about you. She read the words over and over again. With each successive read, the words reverberated louder and louder inside her skull like a feedback loop, getting more garbled and meaningless, while at the same time causing Maenad exponential frustration. You do this to yourself and We don't want to see you hurt again and Be careful. Behind curled lips, Maenad leaned forward at her desk, her skeletal hands gripping it like they would a roller coaster, turning her knuckles an impossible white. In the blackness of her quarters, at two thirty in the morning, she was hunched over the computer reading the letter that her parents had sent back to her. How smug they were, she thought. How easy it was for them.

She sat back, not taking her eyes off the screen, not letting go of the desk. She widened her eyes and raised her brows, visibly unimpressed, but only her plants could tell from their places in the shadows. They knew this side of Maenad better than anyone, and if they knew anything they knew that what was looming was not the Maenad they liked. She eventually shook her head, ever so slowly, and her breathing quickened. He cannot feel the same way about you. We don't want to see you hurt again. She suddenly closed the letter, returning to the atrocious symbol of the United Federation of Planets, and she stared at the touchscreen beneath the display for several minutes.

What did her parents know about her? What did she do to herself? Force men to reject her? Or, did she put herself into situations over which she had no control? Well, neither. She did neither, she had convinced herself. Her parents knew nothing about her. She wasn't nine years old anymore. She wasn't fourteen, she wasn't five. She was a grown woman of thirty-one, almost thirty-two. She was a respected academic. In fact, she had to deal with the children that her parents thought she belonged with. That was her life. She was so much more mature than them. It wasn't her fault that her profession carried a certain asexual quality to it. Just because she chose an intellectual's life did not mean she couldn't have desires like every other human being. She liked people. She felt, she had emotions, she wasn't a robot like everybody in the world loved to think. She might have looked severe, but she was very emotional. She loved to love. So what? Who wasn't? Be careful. She spat the words in her head a few more times. What did they know? Who did they think she was?

Maenad pressed her eyes, filling with anger so severe that she felt a sting in them, like she could cry. But she had cried enough lately, which she knew perfectly well, and she decided that right now was not the time. She loved her parents, but she hated them too. Why bother writing them if this is what they would tell her. There was no point. But there was no point to anything, was there? There was no reason to get out of bed. She could die and the universe wouldn't care. It would be like she had never existed after a period of time, and it wouldn't have been that long a time, either. She sighed because she could do whatever she wanted and, because it didn't matter, only her own pleasure mattered. That was how she had always lived, that was how she lived now, and that would be how she would live until the day that she died.

Why she was so angry was a complex answer. Her mind was incapable at the moment of figuring it out but, whenever it was ready, it would tell her that the truth was a hard thing to accept. Especially when she wanted it as badly as she did. The truth, to her, didn't exist anywhere at any time, ever. But right now, where she was in her state of mind, hearing that her best friend was not really her friend, and from the only people she had ever truly loved for as long as she had known what love was, grabbed her heart inside her chest and crushed it. Liyar. She wrote to her parents about him because, to her, he was all that mattered in her life. She had her job, she had her responsibilities, she had her department, and all of the so-called important things in her life, but when it came down to living, there was only him. She didn't know how. She didn't know why. She only knew that for her, right now, that was truest thing in her life.

He was a Vulcan. He was not emotional like she was, yet she knew that there was something inside him that cared about her. Not just as an element that he had to interact with, but as a person. As something. He listened to her, he let her cry on his shoulder, he let her hug him, he let her rest on him. Why? Was it because he liked her? She crushed her teeth against each other. She blinked. He cared about her safety; he was training her in martial arts, or whatever the Vulcans called it. She couldn't remember. It didn't matter. She narrowed her eyes. Be careful. Don't hurt yourself... again. He didn't like her. He couldn't like anything. He trained her because it was logical. If the ship were boarded, she would be a prime target. She could hardly lift a chair, what could she do.

And had anyone else tried the things that she had with him? No. Liyar wasn't exactly the best company, she knew. People thought he was abrasive. People thought he didn't like them. Other people were normal. They had friends who could understand them. They shared each other's emotions. Talked and did all the things she was never good at doing. Kiwosk entered her mind and she imagined a baseball bat hitting the side of his head. Jealousy, whatever. Liyar was, in a way, as alien on this ship as she was to everything. She attached herself to him out of familiarity. He never had a choice. She had never stopped to consider what she was doing. He had no idea who she was, or how desperately pathetic she truly was. How humans would make fun of her if only they knew. Her life would be a black comedy. How alone she was. How hilariously sad. Liyar had no idea that she was setting herself up to become attracted to him. How could he have?

Ignoring herself and her parents, Maenad stood up from her computer and walked across to the desk where she kept her notebook, near the window. Her blinds, however, were closed and still the only light came from the idle computer screen on the other side of the room. Her bare skin made her look like a ghost, but she hardly glided. She moved jaggedly, distraught, purposely. She sat down, opened a drawer and pulled out a box of matches. She opened it, picked out a match, and struck it on the side of the box. A large flame lit up, which she held to a single candle at the corner of the desktop until it lit. She shook the match to extinguish it and tossed it carelessly onto the wooden surface. There was a jar of pens at the opposite corner and she took a black one that she liked at the same time the other hand opened the notebook.

She pressed the pen to the page, trying to think of what to write, but thinking usually ruined these things. Liyar, she wrote, I kissed you because I love you. She straightened her back. Was that true? She frowned, then. She hadn't thought of writing that. It just came. So it had to be true, didn't it? She didn't know. What more was there to say? Was this spite for her parents? She had to know. Who told someone that they loved them before they did anything with them? Psychopaths. She was not a psychopath. The pen went back to the paper. I like spending time with you. I think of you at night and in the day. She stopped. Looked down at the sharp lines that made her writing. Would he be able to read it? She signed her name as Mae, which she never did for anything. She tore the page out of the book and held it up to reread it. He was still awake.

Maenad stood. She went to the door. She was only wearing a t-shirt and underwear. She was supposed to be in bed, that's why. She would have to get dressed. Her body moved on instinct more than thought. There was no thought at all, in fact. She found her clothes heaped on the floor next to the couch, but before she could start to redress, she stopped. Maenad, she heard. She looked up, standing as though she were a statue on a plinth striking a boring pose. She remembered the letter from her parents. What she was doing was futile; she would give him the letter, and then what? What did she expect from him? A kiss, like the one that went unrequited in the holodeck? Or his invitation for her to stay the night in his quarters, which probably after realising her chaotic mind (which he could) had latched onto him like a sick dog made him send her home.

He didn't like her. He didn't feel for her. He didn't anything. He put up with her, that was all. Utter indifference. Everything else she had invented out of convenience, because of what the carnal part of her mind wanted so badly. She held up the letter again, reread it, and sighed. She closed her eyes as she suddenly calmed. Being a scientist, she was fortunately able to find the rational self before it was too late. If she went through with this, everything her parents said would be true. Maenad went back to her desk and held the letter out to the flame of the candle without any hesitation at all. It caught in a second, the flame grew, and turned the room into a bright flickering yellow. She held it until the flame reached her fingers, which she let singe until the light had gone, leaving only flakes of ash on the desktop. She stood there for a moment, trying to find herself in reality. It took a while, but when she did she blew out the candle.

Maenad walked over to the computer screen, turned it off, and undressed herself as she walked to her bedroom. She got into bed, laid flat on her back, and stared up through the window at the stars, wide-eyed and still, for a very long time until she eventually was able to sleep.

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