The World

A.N.: Just a little something I wrote. I heart irony. (: Hope yous like.

Dear Dairy,

The world is beutiful.

Love,

Camena

I stare at this one entry, again and again and again. The first few times I read it, all I see are the obvious spelling errors, the terseness. But the next few times, I see the utter beauty of the entry. Whenever I wrote it, I didn’t date it, but I can tell that it’s from first grade, because that was my “dairy”-writing phase.

I flip through the other entries in the diary. The pages are old and dusty now, but if I look back, I can imagine a time when I was just a brave new soul, sitting down on a too-big desk and penning these words with a pudgy hand. The letters are smudged and most of the other entries are lengthier, telling about the mean Queen Bees who wouldn’t let me play with them, the boy that picked on my friends who I secretly thought was kind of cute, endless things, on and on. Each time, I find myself hypnotized by the beutiful passage. Something about it seems so innocent, so vague. As if I didn’t get to finish writing it, and I was going to start a new sentence but I never got to it.

And then I decide upon one thing.

The entry is a lie, and the world is hideous.

**

One Month Later:

I can hear the pastor’s voice, below me. I know he is talking about me. I can see the people he is talking too as well, and some of them are crying. Not even most of them are. Is this how ugly the world is?

I can spot my mother, so beautiful, so beutiful. She looks pretty in the little black dress she wears. But more important than that, she is crying too. I can’t remember any other time she has cried for me, but now she’s crying for all the times she hadn’t. She leans on my father, my tuxedo-clad father. He cries too, I can see it trickling on his cheek, but he isn’t wrenching. He’s stiff, like cardboard. My little brother is sitting next to the little box they decided to put me in. The pastor glances at him as he speaks but he never moves. I taught him to be like that. I give a weary smile at him, but I know he can’t see.

I zone back into what the pastor is saying. He is saying that what happened was a horrible accident and that he wished that I didn’t have to end this way. I disagree; I shake my head but nothing matters where I am. Nothing was an accident, nothing is an accident, and nothing ever will be an accident. My end was not an accident; I chose to end things up.

“Camena,” the pastor booms, “wherever you are, you may not be here physically, but your soul still blazes on, m’dear.”

Not really. I decided to stomp it out so long ago.

So there lies a girl in a coffin, surrounded by the beutiful people who she thought she hated, but tried to love her. So there lies someone who died, who thought the world was pretty then faced the ugly truth. So there she is, next to her brother.

But the brother has something to say.

He pulls something out from behind his back, swinging his legs like a swing set. I recognize it immediately, its crinkly pages and smudged ink. My “dairy”. Normally I would scream at him for taking it, but that’s when I was alive. He slowly turns the pages with his gentle fingers. The crowd watches like vultures waiting for the prey. I don’t hear mom sobbing. Everything is silent but the turning pages.

He clears his through softly. I look into his pale blue eyes expectantly, a slow smile on my face. He closes his eyes, then like a butterfly opening its wings, opens them again. His words fill the church.

“The world,” he says, “is beutiful.”

And I burst into tears, because he’s right.