Walls

In life she had only been fourteen. I watch, from a distance as
people slowly walk past her coffin, heads bowed. In death she radiated
a beauty. She looked at peace, asleep. In life she had had walls. I
remember the first time I had seen her, at the age of eleven. Her eyes
had been open, light dancing in them. She was no beauty to look at but
she had an air of innocence around her and I knew that even at my young
age I had fallen in love. After seven blissful weeks I had to leave
her. When I next came across her she was thirteen. Her eyes had
hardened, she had closed all the doors to her soul. I had watched,
hidden in shadow as she had sobbed her heart out into her pillow every
night. I had watched as by day she had become colder and colder. Her
walls had become harder and she stopped trusting. It was on her
fourteenth birthday that I saw her tip open a bottle and count out
fourteen pills. She was calm and cold as she stared at the white
tablets. Her family, if you could call them that had gone out to a pub,
leaving the birthday girl alone in the house. She lifted a tablet up to
her mouth, a determined look on her face. Even though I had no breath,
I held it prying to whatever existed up there to stop her. There was a
yell of frustration and she flung the tablets back into the
bottle.
Lying on her bad that night, tears began to flow. I watched as always,
hidden in the shadows. She was broken that night, her walls striped
away. Yet at the end of it all she seemed like the girl I had fallen in
love with, her eyes gentle once more. That afternoon I sit with her as
she waits for her mother to come home. I could tell that she was going
to tell her what she had almost done. Even though I knew she couldn't
hear me I whispered soothing words trying to calm her down. The
innocent had returned as she sat there, the beauty of her soul shinning
once more. A key turned in the lock and she jumped, dropping the glass
that she was twisting in her hands. Before she could blink there had
been a yell and the monster that was her mother was hitting her,
screaming. The beating only stopped when the girl had colasllped. The
mother had prodded her once or twice then simply left her there. I
lurked in the shadows unable to help her and waited for her to wake up.
When she did her eyes where empty, all her faith in everything
shattered. I saw her re-build her walls hiding her pain. I also saw her
grow paler by the day. She slowly stopped eating and grew thinner.
Though it all her parents ignored it. They blamed her lack of appetite
to cutting off her nose deeps' her face and called the reason for her
paleness sluicing in her room all day. When they took her to the
doctors it was too late, two weeks later she was dead. A wasted life.
I'm watching her funeral anger building. The frauds that are her
parents are crying.
"Why didn't she tell us she felt unwell I would have listened!" It
seems even in death everything is her fault. The ceremony is a fake. On
her death bed she had asked to be cremated and her ashes spread over
the sea so she could be with her dead boy friend. Even in death what
she wants is ignored. I slowly reach over and try to touch that face.
As always I pass though her. Hearing a sigh behind me I turn. She
stands there. Her beauty of innocence rests in the smile she is giving
me. Our hands reach out and for the first time scene I died I touch
something. We kiss and oblivion claims me.
If an on-looker had listened very hard they might have heard the
softest of sighs as the two ghostly figures melt in to each other then
slowly fade away. They probably would have turned away, thinking it was
there imagination and return to watching the coffin baring the empty
shell being lowered in to the ground, the sigh forgotten. As is
everything in this world.

The End.