The Last Worship
Note: The following is straight out of my head, in case you didn't know. Something weird that popped into my head a few minutes ago.
It was a Friday night and I saw the last bit of magic leave the world. I was downtown in the evening and the moment lasted almost forever, but not nearly long enough. In that moment it was like finding an item from your childhood that you never even noticed had gone missing; this sort of thing had mostly disappeared and nobody had even thought about it.
She was the world's last goth girl.
I spotted her among a group of friends; all the others had modernized, put on jeans and t-shirts, flopped their hair down over their eyes. The same boring emo kids you see everywhere you go. She reluctantly followed, you could barely tell she was even part of the group. The rest stomped on excitedly, a crowd of monkeys talking loudly while their shirts proclaimed how much they hated the world. She glided along behind them in silence with a grace that made this moment seem important somehow; like a wedding and a funeral all at once. A lacy black skirt hovering barely over the concrete without touching, a velvet jacket buttoned up to the neck, and the gloves, not those five-dollar fingerless do-nothing decorations the rest wore, but elaborate woven things that made her movements difficult to follow, like each glance of skin was a magic trick. Her face was painstakingly made up with a white base and black and blue designs around her mouth and eyes, and somehow I knew that she never repeated the same look twice, this, like all the others, was unique. Her hair was arranged in a ponytail sticking up into the gray sky, draping down her neck.
She saw me looking and leaned her head in my direction, each movement slow and thought out, each curve of her face and neck deliberate. The corners of her lips turned upwards slightly, not a fake smile but a sad one, a message of sympathy sent out to the stranger who understood the ritual. I imagined we could hear each other's thoughts then, with our eyes locked for that one moment.
Why have the rest gone? I asked. The world could use more magic.
The world has moved on. Her voice in my mind was a screaming whisper, cold but thin, like the air when fall first sets in. When I get home I shall take off this mask, become just another human like my friends.
You're not human, you're a goddess. The night won't be the same without you.
We wore the masks of gods, trying to escape, to make ourselves outcasts of the world. But the world heaped its thoughts on us, and we couldn't take it. We changed what the world expected of us, and now to get away we must make sure nobody expects anything from us. We must become like vermin that the world ignores.
Don't do it, I pleaded. I need you. A world without mystery isn't worth keeping.
It's too late. Tomorrow all the mystery will fly away, leaving just a skinny girl exposing her secrets for petty attentions on the internet. Everything ends. I'm sorry. Then she broke the eye contact and lowered her gaze to the pavement, pacing along behind her friends, a last funeral march for the last funeral dress.
I watched her disappear into another shitty club, listening to the music that sounded like petty little pains slowly fading as the door swung closed. The world became nothing but grays again, and I could look at the shadows and know once more that there was nothing special hidden in them. I wandered along with images of gods and goddesses in my head, and an icy whisper in my head like a single dead leaf against a window. We wanted to be gods, but gods of funerals and winter can't create, they can only watch the old things go. And the gods of spring haven't arrived yet.
It was a Friday night and I saw the last bit of magic leave the world. I was downtown in the evening and the moment lasted almost forever, but not nearly long enough. In that moment it was like finding an item from your childhood that you never even noticed had gone missing; this sort of thing had mostly disappeared and nobody had even thought about it.
She was the world's last goth girl.
I spotted her among a group of friends; all the others had modernized, put on jeans and t-shirts, flopped their hair down over their eyes. The same boring emo kids you see everywhere you go. She reluctantly followed, you could barely tell she was even part of the group. The rest stomped on excitedly, a crowd of monkeys talking loudly while their shirts proclaimed how much they hated the world. She glided along behind them in silence with a grace that made this moment seem important somehow; like a wedding and a funeral all at once. A lacy black skirt hovering barely over the concrete without touching, a velvet jacket buttoned up to the neck, and the gloves, not those five-dollar fingerless do-nothing decorations the rest wore, but elaborate woven things that made her movements difficult to follow, like each glance of skin was a magic trick. Her face was painstakingly made up with a white base and black and blue designs around her mouth and eyes, and somehow I knew that she never repeated the same look twice, this, like all the others, was unique. Her hair was arranged in a ponytail sticking up into the gray sky, draping down her neck.
She saw me looking and leaned her head in my direction, each movement slow and thought out, each curve of her face and neck deliberate. The corners of her lips turned upwards slightly, not a fake smile but a sad one, a message of sympathy sent out to the stranger who understood the ritual. I imagined we could hear each other's thoughts then, with our eyes locked for that one moment.
Why have the rest gone? I asked. The world could use more magic.
The world has moved on. Her voice in my mind was a screaming whisper, cold but thin, like the air when fall first sets in. When I get home I shall take off this mask, become just another human like my friends.
You're not human, you're a goddess. The night won't be the same without you.
We wore the masks of gods, trying to escape, to make ourselves outcasts of the world. But the world heaped its thoughts on us, and we couldn't take it. We changed what the world expected of us, and now to get away we must make sure nobody expects anything from us. We must become like vermin that the world ignores.
Don't do it, I pleaded. I need you. A world without mystery isn't worth keeping.
It's too late. Tomorrow all the mystery will fly away, leaving just a skinny girl exposing her secrets for petty attentions on the internet. Everything ends. I'm sorry. Then she broke the eye contact and lowered her gaze to the pavement, pacing along behind her friends, a last funeral march for the last funeral dress.
I watched her disappear into another shitty club, listening to the music that sounded like petty little pains slowly fading as the door swung closed. The world became nothing but grays again, and I could look at the shadows and know once more that there was nothing special hidden in them. I wandered along with images of gods and goddesses in my head, and an icy whisper in my head like a single dead leaf against a window. We wanted to be gods, but gods of funerals and winter can't create, they can only watch the old things go. And the gods of spring haven't arrived yet.