Fragment .02

"So it was four or five of everything, as you are no good.
I saw it through the frame and through my face.
Covering my eyes, because we are nothing,
and never quite the same from a black and white summer.
With photographs that showed our rails and razorblades.
I think it cured my pain, again.

Promise you will go down my neck.
Just like those pills and your cigarette."

-- "December" by Lydia

Only a single photograph sits on her desk. A reminder of her single biggest regret. She doesn't look at it much anymore, save when she awakes in the morning to discover that it has fallen off the corner of her desk again during the night.

Until now, Freya drove blindfolded all her life, oblivious to the signs that flashed by in the margins of her life's story. The candy-coated metal of her life's vehicle was but an armor, keeping others out and shutting herself inside. It was her instrument of freedom, and yet it was her cage.

But the blindfold is gone now. Ripped off of her face, she is blinded yet again -- not from darkness, but from light. The signs are everywhere. The conveniently vacant seat on the bus, for instance. She knows what she could have -- should have -- done. But she followed her gut reaction instead and recoiled from the opportunity in the opposite direction.

She's heard the terms thrown around in her psychology class. Cognition. Conditioning. Stimulus. A rat is conditioned by an electric shock to avoid sitting on the platform. Birds learn to avoid the deliciously beautifully yet bitterly poisonous butterflies. Freya almost expects to find her own picture in the pages of her textbook.

"Human girl is conditioned to respond fearfully to deceptively handsome faces, in fear of reliving the memory of her photographs again."