Bridges.

The Polaroid that hung at the edge of her cork board was tacked with a red button-pin, and judging from the dust that had accumulated on the surface, it had probably been hanging since the beginning of time. Above her spotless mahogany workspace these things remained: things to be remembered, things expected to be lost and, despite Maybee’s tendency toward detachment, all things cherished. The snap of the pin breaking loose was only a fraction of what she might have imagined- no fire, heat or smoke at the burning of this bridge- and she was left with only an instant of remorse for the picture’s corner, so easily severed.

June 20th, 2008

It's strange indeed, the human mind's ability to cope in the face of consistent frustration. As Glen put it, we are like machines, and my mine is no good. Once oiled, polished by a year and a half of Wednesday therapy, is now torn asunder, laying in pieces throughout portions of me: in my room, in my bath tub, on the lawn of Ashley Pond and in my bed. I am scattered, and every place I think to look to recollect my sordid pieces, I find a part of myself that I wish I couldn't see.

I am invisible, my emotions, my eyes and my skin of no consequence to the world at large. Despite my greatest wishes, pleadings and urges, the bombs will still fly, minorities will still be forced to fight for their rights, the man without a voice will be brutalized and misunderstood, and I will still be small, open, and ultimately alone. There is no cure for that. There is no switch to flip that I may not feel the hopelessness of my misfortune. I have no button that will force these thoughts and memories from me, and I will always remember what love (or, rather, love in it's smallest, most saturated of forms) has left me in its wake.

My fingers were soft, brittle, easily broken, but I thickened. With each shout, with each argument and each brutal exchange my bones hardened and my smiles were less and less frequent. My voice, once so wondrous a visitor, is now hardly a visitor at all, but a stranger in your presence. I am bullet proof, my emotional shield untainted, flawless and stainless steel. I am, without a doubt, your adversary, but I am afraid. Easily bruised, I was a woman without restraint. I ran until I bled and I was gifted with the knowledge in this, in my pain, that in some form or another I was still a human being. Now, I feel only the incessant lack of me. I cry only because I should, I ache and I shout because these are the motions, and I fuck because in the darkness, in the shadows where a sweaty palm meets mine, I am of use to you.

I have no more reason to love. This carbon shell that has grown around my heart constricts me, and I am no longer a slave of emotion. I am your slave, your thing.

My body is nothing without your touch. My body is nothing without your fists.

Legacy.

Man’s fear of dying, he once said, is that there will not be a single story told or written in his name.

I found his books in the empty well beside the road, the pages and paperback covers wet with mold. Radley had made sure to scatter the ashes of his former life where they might have been of use to someone, somewhere, perhaps someday in the distant future. He was not one to press his ideas upon the minds of others, even one so supple, so loyal as my own. Burning them, pitching them somewhere the wolves could play with them would have been wasteful.

Back then I had believed that lie.

Time capsules are man’s way of justifying his own existence. They are boxes of jewelry, love letters, childhood momentos and pictures, things that dated their time and their place as human beings on this earth and things set aside for future generations to come. Men are forgetful creatures. Though every one has his own individual fingerprint, his own strand of DNA, when they are gone and buried they are soon without identity, dust never again to be uncovered or recognized. All things eventually lose their faces. All things fade from memory, leaving only names and dates, and the things set in stone.