Her moods snaked past cold rivers, forever searching their way to warm seas.  Still, it seemed water threatened to spill from her eyes at every introspective tilt of her head. 

 

She felt the tenderness of her flesh and mused on the way it had become a work of art; delicately and violently wrought into a berry-stained puzzle.  

 

Closing her eyes, she began to dissect and author her life with fictions parallel to the realities she could not bring herself to accept.  She immersed her mind into an ocean of unchartable possibilities, where the world was endless and beautiful again.

​

The sound of laughter simmered in her throat like a soft rain that bathed her in a hideous dye.  She knew it was not happiness, but only an invisible, artificial equivalent to warmth and sun.  After a moment, the glow vanished, leaving her face stained like wet glass. She only smiled -- the veil she wore over her pain -- as the enumeration of her faults unwinded, slow as a scroll.

 

There had been a tragedy, and there was nothing like a tragedy that she could do nothing to remedy.  It was just another part of her accidents, laid before her feet in a continuing succession of conflicting emotions.