National Novel Writing Month! and [Draft] Untitled

In honor of National Novel Writing Month I'm restarting my blog!  I have been writing, but I haven't actually finished very many things.  So my new resolution, in honor of NaNoWriMo, is to try to post at least once per week.

Also, here's a little vignette that I actually managed to finish.  ^_^

She sits and stares at the paper.  It is empty, blank, devoid of feeling.  Like her, the man who claims her as his wife would say.  He is wrong.  She knows this, or thinks she knows this.  But sometimes she wonders if he is not.  The quill is in her hand, poised, as if prepared to write.  But she does not know how.  She does not know what she would say even if she did--perhaps he is right (That is a lie, her heart is so full of things to say that she does not know where to begin.).

Her world is this:  this one room, with its uncomfortable chairs, overdone tables, and shelves and shelves of books that she cannot read.  The man whose wife she is says that she is mistaken.  That she has rooms of riches and servants and dresses.  That everything that is his is hers.  But it is not true.  Nothing here is truly hers.  Not the endless rows of black dresses.  Not the rooms in which she sleeps and he comes to break her in slow degrees (that is not how he sees the imposition of his conjugal rights, but it is the truth).  Even this room is not, though it is more hers than anything else (because she had been here before.  She wonders if he remembers.  Either one.).

She used to wonder if this is like other rooms with books that she (they, her heart demands, but there are some things that cannot be said, even in her thoughts, without weeping and she dares not start because she does not know if she could stop) had explored--with books filled with blank pages, empty spaces where the words should be--but the man who says that he is her husband is too pretentious to accept hollow imitations of books that he does not have the native intelligence to comprehend.  She is unsure if this is a virtue that she should admire or simply another indication of his lack of understanding.

She has stared too long and the ink drips from her quill like blood from a blade.  She turns away from that thought.  (She remembers the blood, the sword, the hand that holds it.)  She avoids memories when she can.  Not because they are painful or frightening (though sometimes they are), but because they lead, inevitably, to this moment when she is hurting and alone.  She is always hurting and alone, but sometimes she fails to notice.  It is like bathing in too cold water.  Eventually, you stop feeling anything at all.

She crumples the ink-stained sheet and casts it aside as she begins to weep.  She did not know what she was thinking, pretending that she could write.  Believing that she would know what to say, even if she did.  It is ruined now, marked, worthless.  Like her.

The servants enter, their faces carefully blank.  She is never quite sure, in moments like these, whether they pity her or are relieved that it is not them.  Perhaps it is a little of both.  She had thought that she had given orders that she was not to be disturbed, but the servants do not always hear her orders (it is a matter of survival.  She understands, though it is difficult not to resent them).  She remembers that there is to be a party, and the servants are there to clean the rooms for the guests.

One of the servants reaches for the crumpled wad of ruined paper and she cries out, snatching it from the ground before he can touch it.  She sits there on the floor for a while, a small sobbing puddle of black silk and lace, clutching the paper as if it is all that remains of her hopes and dreams.  The servants shuffle out, closing the door behind them, leaving her alone to compose herself (they will pay for forgetting to clean the room or she will pay for their oversight or both, but for now she only feels gratitude that they are gone).

Slowly, carefully, she stands and smooths the crumpled sheet of paper out as best she can.  Ruined, damaged, useless for its original purpose, she will not just see it cast aside.  So instead she folds it and slides it into her sleeve.  It is a reminder that not all things that are ruined should be thrown away.