PAIN

Pain, it’s a bitch, isn’t it? They say pain is good, pain is there to let you know you’re alive. Yet, I am pretty sure some deaths feel massive amounts of pain right before their eyes glaze over permanently fixed in death. Right?

Don’t even get me started on emotional pain. It is one of those things that even the closest of observers cannot see. Emotional pain can be that silent killer that eats away at you from the inside out. It can sneak up on you when you least expect it and BAM! It’s got you. You never can tell just by looking at someone the emotional hell they are going through when they seem so normal on the outside.

Take Celeste for example. A beautiful young girl. All of 20 she is of an unknown origin with her caramel-colored skin and her long black curly hair. She is petite but buxom at the same time. She stands there trembling in her white cotton baby doll nightgown the very picture of innocence fingering the simple gold cross she received for her sixteenth birthday, so long ago. Can you picture her? Now picture the reason she trembles. She stands in the library of the drafty old mansion toes sinking further and further into the lush carpet. one hand fingering the cross while the other grips a dagger, a bloody dagger. As her knuckles seem to whiten further from the death grip, she holds on to the ebony carved handle her hooded emerald eyes track the bead of crimson through her thick lashes as it splashes onto the luxuriant white carpet an immediate jolt to the system. Seeing that pinpoint of red as it seems to spread further and further in a sea of pristine puffy clouds

 Can you still picture her? I am sure a million questions are running through your mind right now. How could someone so innocent so young be holding a bloody knife? Where did the knife come from? Whose blood is on the knife? Is sweet and innocent Celeste a murderer? What would you say if I told you not only was she standing there with a bloody knife in her hand, but she was also standing over the owner of the mansion she resided in? A devilishly handsome, debonair man, a man that had more money than God himself. A man that drank more than he ate who also had a different woman warming his bed every day of the week. What might you think of poor sweet Celeste then?

 Did the master of the house try something on Celeste? Is she justified in holding that bloody knife? How is it that she came to live under the same roof as a young handsome billionaire in the first place? What would you say if I told you that Celeste and this man were in love? What would you say if I told you that the rumor going around was that Kyle the handsome proprietor of the property had changed his ways in recent weeks? He no longer bedded women just because he could. He spent less and less time at the bars and more and more time at home. Helping Celeste with her schoolwork. Kyle became fascinated with Celeste after living a lifetime with her under the same roof. He never really saw her until now.

 He remembered the first time he saw her he was nine and she was four. His father had hired her mother as the new governess, and he couldn’t understand why she had to come along for the ride. He didn’t want any little girl with pigtails cramping his style. The first time he realized he loved her he winced at his first memory of her and came to the startling realization even then he loved her, hair and all.  Yet now he lay in a puddle of his own blood dead while his beloved stood over him. Holding the thing that killed him still trembling at the sight in front of her while tears began to leak out of the corner of her eyes. Has your opinion of Celeste changed? Did she in fact kill her love? For what reason? Did he revert to his old ways, and it became too much for Celeste? If she did kill him, what would drive her to such sever actions instead of just walking away from the situation? Has twenty-year-old Celeste lost it? Or is she a product of a wrong time, wrong place situation?

Did she, do it? What do you think? Would it change anything to know that she was raised a sweet an innocent Catholic girl? That until a few short months ago she had been so focused on her studies she almost missed the lightening that struck her the moment Kyle became more to her than simply the boss’s son. Still traumatized from her father being shot dead in front of her at the age of two Celeste had seen several things in her young life that would make any other person either insane or a criminal. She took it all in stride. Her mother doing anything and everything she could to make ends meet, to Celeste her mother was her hero. Never compromising who she was because of her situation. She was determined to teach Celeste the right way of doing things. Celeste being the shy kid never had it easy in school either. From the moment she entered kindergarten she knew she didn’t belong with any of her peers. Cast as the outcast she was made fun of from day one. Being fatherless, didn’t help either. Mr. Covington hiring her mother and welcoming her into his home was a godsend. She remembered the day she met Kyle with his little suit and his perfectly straight blonde hair. She knew the second she met him she would never be good enough. Yet strangely six months ago she could hardly believe it when he asked her to split an ice cream with him and the rest as they say was history until tonight that is. She remembered the moment their lips touched for the first time. It was nothing more than Magic. She knew then and there that he would be the death of her but this. This was something different all together.

Suffering more than her fair share and her mother dying of cancer just one year ago she didn’t think that she could take one more thing. Then this happened.

Can you picture her now? Still standing there in her baby dolly gown. Her bare feet sinking even further into the carpet. Her green eyes opening wide to the moonlight as sirens start to rent the silence of the air.  Do you still think she did it? Or is she innocent? What happened to Kyle? What could he have done that would drive her to murder him?

Well, here it is. This is not one of those stories where the ending happens to be happy. Sometimes, life just doesn’t pan out that way. As the cops burst into the room watching as Celeste drops the knife. She had a death grip on not moments ago. The shock wears off and she flings herself onto Kyle her screams can be heard from blocks away. Kyle had enemies which no one will investigate because who is to question a woman possibly scorned standing over the body with the murder weapon in her hand. According, to the cops it is an open and shut case. What they don’t know is that a woman matching her hair color and body type matching Celeste’s body type had been in the room moments ago begging Kyle to take her back. Seriously pissed that he had dumped her for some one like Celeste. Poor white trash as she had called her. Jealously can get ugly on a woman, can’t it? Without even blinking she grabbed his dagger off his desk plunging it into his heart. Hearing someone in the hall she bailed out the open window. Mere seconds before Celeste came bursting in the room with a smile on her face which quickly faded as she took in the scene before here.

 Undone by what she was witnessing she grabbed the dagger without even thinking about it not realizing that she had just placed her fingerprints on the murder weapon. She stood there frozen in place watching as his life drained down the dagger onto the plush carpeting not wanting to believe her beloved was dead. Screaming gut wrenching screams as the cops carried her off into the back of a car. Her protests of innocence drowned over the sound of the siren carting her off to jail.

I bet your thinking Celeste knows pain. Doesn’t she?

She has lost everyone in her life that ever mattered to her. Including the love of her life the man she was accused of killing and would spend the next twenty years in prison for.  Never really letting herself grieve for him because she knew if she did fall apart, she would never recover. She would be broken forever. She carries the pain within her daily. Why doesn’t she just kill herself? Is the question I am sure you are asking right about now. However, this is what I find fascinating about pain. Some can carry great amounts of it without ever faltering and some can carry very little before they crack. What would you say if I told you that once Celeste gets out of prison at the age of forty, she finally begins to pick up the pieces of her broken life and even finds love again? Could you, do it? Would you, do it?  Like I said earlier, pain is a bitch. No matter how you look at it. What’s your pain threshold?