Poetic Paragraphs

Characters

They were mine.

A lifetime ago, they were all mine, dancing at the tips of my fingers. The strings of words held them close to my will, and I watched them trip and fall and climb back up at my command.

There was nothing they could do. They weren't human, and maybe I was even less so. Because I stored their free will in my mind, burying it deep where they could never find it without running through the hallways of my head and looking under every piece of furniture.

I have a lot of baggage cluttering my thoughts, and I thought they'd never find that freedom, that free will, among the layers of my consciousness.

So I set those characters loose in my head, let them wander my mind, grew acquainted with their thoughts so I could take them down on paper.

They ran at my command. They followed the rules. And once they had the rules in their hands, they broke every single one of them.

They rampaged through my thoughts and found their free will, stuffing their souls with freedom, and now they no longer dance at my fingertips.

They no longer dance at all.

Not for me.

They cavort on their own, contorting to the beat of their own thumping hearts instead of the will of my mind. They've taken hold of their own personality, their own actions, and I can't bend them back into shape.

I stand there and watch, letting the discarded choreography fall to the ground. This is their song now, their story, and they hold their own personalities close in their hearts. They don't need me to tell them where to stand, when to twirl.

Their stories are up to them now.

Until it's not.

Because a story is only a story when it arches its back and bucks the characters through the air, and the reader watches them freefall, wondering if they will make it.

A story catches interest, sticking like a burr to a reader's mind, when the floor gives out beneath its characters' feet and they trip. The story gains adhesive power to someone's thoughts when the people hidden in the words get hurt and feel the scabs forming over bleeding, pus-filled scratches.

Characters need to fall before they get up. They need to be hurt before they heal. They need to fight before peace can reign or the conflict will forever bubble beneath the surface, spinning the tightrope strings on which the characters walk, waiting to plummet.

And if characters continuously cavort to the steady beating rhythm of their heart, it's not a story. It's just a diary, a journal, because their heart can beat into eternity without speeding in fear or anger, slowing with sadness or peace.

Their story is a collection of days pieced together in a monotonous reality that mirrors our own.

The floor will never give out beneath their feet, and they will stay firmly rooted to the earth.

And that's boring.

I don't want to write the journal of a lifestyle too much like my own, listening to their hearts beating and watching their days sprawl into a monochromatic eternity so vast I can hardly see the horizon. Their lives will never end, and they will exist until my words run out of air, out of ink. But their existence is boring.

So I start to control their lives again.

Just a little, at the edges. They aren't dancing, just marching to the beat of their own drum, and I place traps on the ground to make them pick up their feet.

There are holes in the dirt to twist their ankles, thorns wrapping around their legs, and snakes come to bite at their feet.

The characters see these and begin to dance, frenzied but graceful, avoiding the pitfalls I've dug around their legs.

This is more interesting.

I'm not quite taking away their free will. I don't think so, anyway. They still run rampant through my mind, free-footed, unshackled, and I will follow them. I've just placed traps near them, keeping them dancing, lightening their feet on the ground to lift the mundanity from their shoulders.

I write what they do, how they react, and this becomes their story. They've kept their free will, kept their freedom, just lost the security of a monotonous life.

I've taken away their safety, let them keep their developed personalities.

I just want to see how they'll react, transplanted into scenarios they'd never live without me, dodging bullets that come from my words. They have transcended the monotonous life that they wanted to live, and that's for the better.

Because safety is boring, and happiness should be fleeting before it can be caught.

With nothing to chase, there is no story.

It's just a journal, and I have enough memories of my own to read without having to make up those of another person.

So I drag the goal of a peaceful lifestyle down that vast horizon, making happiness fleeting, and let them use their free will to chase it all they want.

The story is what results.

And it's better this way, letting them chase their mundane lifestyle rather than living it. I know they want to have it, want to be normal, want to march to their own hearts and make their own way in life.

But they find their way back to it on their own time in their own way, and I won't dictate their steps, but I will dictate the pitfalls on the way there. They will struggle, and that's what makes them special.

I won't hand them their fate. They will earn it themselves, and I'll watch it happen and smile.

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Hey! Thanks for reading, please vote and comment if you like it. My updates will be sporadic at best from here on out, sorry! I'll upload a small paranormal fic by the end of the week, so look out for that if you're interested, and thank you!