ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was fate, and the cosmos, the universe. And there was darkness, the earth, and the stars.

And then, there was her. The writer, and her typewriter. 

She lived on the earth.

It was very dark, where she lived.

The only source of light was the dim flickering of the writer's dying candle as she typed away, writing about everything.

She wrote about the darkness, about the dark world she lived in.

She wrote about the lack of color and splendor in the robotic people she saw around her every day, living life without meaning, purpose and adventure.

She wrote about how the children never played outside, or laughed anymore.

She wrote about how no one went on any adventures anymore.

And about how the people around her never cared about anything but money and power.

She watched people throw themselves into splendor, making themselves beautiful from the outside, but ugly on the inside.

She watched how people became clones of one another, shunning away the different ones, the ones who didn't fit in. 

The ones like herself.

She watched her home become nothing but a shell of the wonderful place it once was.

She wrote about how the stars never shined anymore.

How there was knowledge, but no wisdom. How there was an abundance of light, but it was all fake.

How she had grown up with infinite dreams and wishes, only for them to be crushed and stamped upon before they even bloomed.

She wrote about how imagination slowly died.

She wrote and wrote, and did not stop, hoping to change the world with her words. Hoping to restore her home to its former glory.

Hoping to fill the world with stories of what could be.

But the people laughed at her words, and shunned her away, shutting her out and calling her a freak and a weirdo.

But she did not lose hope.

She kept on writing.

All night long, her fingers tipped and tapped, and the typewriter clicked and clacked, filling sheets and sheets of paper full of the writer's worries and woes of the past, present and future.

And she did this the next day.

And the day after that too.

And the many days and nights that came after that, inwardly eating herself up about the tragedies she had seen, all the golden blissfulness in her past clouded and forgotten by the storm of misfortune that poisoned her once beautiful world.

And the stars, the sun and the moon watched her do this with no avail.

Despite the long, grueling nights she stayed awake, there was no outcome.

No one read her words.

Because the world was dead.

At long last, the stars could watch her do this no more.

She was their only hope, she was the only beacon of light in the cosmos of darkness.

They approached her.

"Do you know the story of Theo and Ophelia?" they asked her.

The writer lifted her ink-stained fingers from her battered up typewriter, and a faint glimmer of hope appeared in her dead, dark eyes.

She slowly nodded.

Oh, she knew that story.

She knew the story really, really well.

It was her favorite.

"Write for us," the stars said.

The stars had watched her write for the lifeless human bodies that lived on the earth, only for her efforts and talents to go to waste.

Now, they wanted her to write for them.

To write for herself.

If the world did not like what she wrote, then it was their loss.

But the stars could not let all that talent, imagination and the marvelous eloquence of writing that she possessed go to waste.

They couldn't lose her, not their only hope.

And so, they told her to write her favorite story, because they knew she would write it well.

And they knew what would happen next.

She would pour herself into the story of Theo and Ophelia, and fill her own, little world with light again, just enough for her to live like she once did.

A fictional world was better than the one she lived in anyway.

And so, the writer sat in her favorite spot by the window, hunched over her typewriter, as she tightened her old, worn out shawl around her shoulders, striking a match to light up her candle, and began to write.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a story like no other.

The story of Theo, and Ophelia.

It is also the story of the writer.

{ i just felt like i HAD to publish this. it has been in my drafts for ages, and i wasn't sure how it would be received... please comment your thoughts on this. spam me with comments.
i hope you liked this little ballad of mine.
for new readers: this is recently published, compared to the rest of the chapters. i have had it written, for a while, but i was a bit shy in posting it.
comment your thoughts
lots of love, jasmine. }

{ SEP 02. 2024 }