Short Story #2 - Gone
After a year of brutality and violence in the form of words, she was beaten down. Broken. She closed her story, strapped the book, placed in a box, and buried under a pile of memories. She kept it closed, never opened it, thought of it, looked at it. It was as if that point of time was gone. Until one day.
She made some friends, new ones, and they wanted to know her story, because, well, she didn't give it out at all.
They asked, "Why don't you talk?"
And there was no response.
They tried, again, a few times more, "Please tell us; why don't you talk?"
Except this time, there was a response. She said, shyly and in a whisper, "I want an audience."
They were confused and it took them a bit of time until they understood. She would only talk if she had someone to listen to her. It made sense; why talk when no one will hear? It was to save her breath. Piece by piece, they pressured more information out of her. She didn't realize it then.
She was having a conversation, once, and they laughed. They believed she was silly, interesting, a person worth befriending. So they did. She liked them; they were friendly.
Eventually, their friendliness ended. She would tell a story, worth the memory to her, but they would say, either while she was still telling the story or afterwards, "I'm sorry, could you repeat that, I wasn't listening."
At first, it was polite, but it got to a rude sneer soon. Sometimes, while just telling her day, or stuff she daydreamed about, they would say, "How 'bout you just shut up now?"
She felt abandoned again.
So she fled. She left, went away, never spoke at all.
Then, after time, they wondered, "Where is she?"
"Why doesn't she talk?"
Then they realized, they had driven her away.
They made a mistake in which their friend had left. Not to another group or another place, but off the face of the earth.
She was gone.
Permanently.
