The Scorching of Paris and Princesses

Chapter One

I find myself thinking of my life in Paris often.

The light that I found in it and the joy - the simplicity. That simplicity was a golden gift wrapped in satin and torn apart savagely by real-world nuances. Living with my uncle was confirmation that every horror that had happened didn't just happen in my head.

It was strenuous on both our accounts - he dared not talk to me and I dared not talk to him unless necessary to not further embed into him the living image of his brother's death. And for me, I wished not to see my father's face for he was an echo of it. It haunted me enough.

It all felt out of place.

My father's only brother - my only uncle - and yet I had never met the man before the fire. His face was one that never showed at the funeral. It was surreal how the man who was now my legal guardian chose not to show up on such an occasion.

And so I thought it was abysmal, having to live with a stranger and go back to school. Perhaps I still carried the sting I felt as I buried them in the ground, my sister still wasting away in a hospital bed and my arms too weak to carry her to a better one - a distant cousin here and there as loose family sniffed around me like a dog whining for scraps.

Scraps of money?
They reeked of want.
The stench made me gag and choke.

Pity. My parents, despite appearances deduced, I understand were never drowning in it. And I was yet to see it, my fortune to only be given to me when I turned eighteen.

The moment I lost sight of my parents forever was reduced to a fake hum of compassion from strange faces that claimed to know me through and through and to have stuck beside me through thick and thin.

They were strangers to me.

You poor thing, they'd say. Who will you be staying with? They'd enquire the same thing with the same wrinkled brow - one that was crinkled in fake sincerity. We have a beautiful annexe in our garden, they'd whisper generically, a nice room with a gorgeous view of a rose garden - your great cousin Jon imported the roses straight from England. The English Rose is the finest, as you must already know. You should stay with us, dearie.

At least Uncle Robert would've been a pillar on which I could learn to stand alongside. he didn't jam sweet, perfumed words down my throat like they did. He didn't tell me things I didn't care to hear, he hardly told me anything. I found peace in it. It was quiet.

Having been homeschooled I had completed all my studies, so school would hopefully be easy to pass through. Maybe I would even learn something else, something to feed my brain that seemed now a sticky and volatile place - a place easy to get stuck - thinking things only for the sake of thinking things. Hence why I engrossed myself with with work at the grill. There I didn't have to think, just do.

I was being blind. I knew it. I had pulled a blackened sheet over my eyes as I succumbed to my misery and only now was brave enough to tug it loose.

Mystic Falls was a new beginning.

Solemnly, however, Uncle Robert was a tether to a tree I couldn't quite chop and burn down completely. I still clung to an image of him like a child with their favourite toy. This cracked and fragmented view that we could be a happy little family was a double-edged sword that would require me to forget and fathom myself into a happy little creature with happiness and hopes and dreams kissing and suffocating everything she thinks. I found it despicable - this image - and completely addictive all at once.

I was friendless due to joining in the summer so I hadn't met anyone at school and I doubted I was going to be a social butterfly having been friendless for the majority of my life except for Bella. And Bella was an exception in itself.

Staying at a boarding school when I was seven, Bella proved to be my only friend due to sharing a bedroom with her and because the company of Sister Sarah didn't account as a plausible friend when you were seven. Most caging was that my French skills still had much to be desired and all the other girls at the school were like a gaggle of geese speaking in words I had yet to master. That was as far as my social skills extended. Pitiful.

I realise it was a meagre feat at validating my social standing. That all came tumbling down when Bella got the flu, and she got it bad. I saw her twice after that, in the hospital. The second time I saw her she passed in her sleep. She was peaceful - at least she seemed it. She had this look on her face, a look that made her seem angelic. I was sure she became an angel at that exact moment, God had been talking to her and at that moment I saw him raise her to the heavens. But who knows what goes through a person's head as they pass from this world into the next? Maybe nothing. How lonely.

Uncle Robert told me it would be a good thing, to go to school. And as daunting as it would be - going to public school with other human beings - I needed to see this as a breakthrough and as a way to finally live just as any other American seventeen-year-old would.

The school started in three days.

I know that now it was time to hope and believe that life can change for the better. Perhaps if I were to make a friend, maybe even two, I would begin to see the glimmers of hope shining through the darkness that had been staining my life as of late.

But Mystic Falls was an intimate place, having worked at the Grill it was plain to see how mostly everyone knew about everyone else - if only vaguely. A problem Paris rarely frequented. A problem that made me queasy. Small towns and then small talk soars out of proportion, at least that's what I heard Father say once or twice.

I knew ten people, at most, in Mystic Falls. And they were only my colleagues. I had spoken most to the siblings' Matt and Vicki and told them half-truths about Paris and told them half-truths about my family and my downward spiral into Mystic Falls. To be quite frank, I had dodged the subject almost entirely like a heated bullet. Vague answers upon vague words with little meaning or worth. A simple way to converse smoothly and a way to fill the otherwise deathly silence. 

I know we were far from friends but at least we were farther from strangers. A drift in the middle of an ocean, but at least the shore was closer to a new horizon rather than the parting one.

And now as I lay in bed, the red and white patchwork duvet drowning me entirely and had I not been so at peace with the lack of air I would've fought with the weight of it - I realise there must be so much more to life than what the world is willing to give me. This soothed and lit the match to a flame so fierce it was sure to make me insane - but both outcomes played in tune with different parts of my heart that were yearning for and craving simplicity and madness all at once.

Going to school was a stepping stone in a pond that was known for its tenacious currents and deadly whirlpools. But my soul was screaming to jump recklessly and see if I could get out of the deep depths in time and be saved from sinking to the sandy floor, but sinking sounded so easy.

In my harrowed head, sinking to my demise as the cold blanketed me and whispered words that worshipped me and wound me in a thick web so inescapable I would have no choice but to submit to its peaceful plunder - it sounded almost pleasant.

Thinking nonsense was now a pastime of mine, Mother. Forgive me for my stupidity.