The Beginning

 As I leaf back through my memories, I find that given the same opportunities that I had then, added with my lofty knowledge gained only through personal experience, I would have done exactly everything I had done, just probably with a bit more style. I also always find that every time I try to recall these certain memories that twist and turn in the deepest part of my mind, like a labyrinth that has no end, only countless beginnings, they seem to change. No not change, simply waver. Things I deemed certain before seem to change, seem to heighten. Exaggerate. Like a boy, who's one aim in life is to impress his glowing mother… exaggerating… eliciting some extravagant reaction… all for that reaction. What reaction was I aiming for? Well I was seven during that day; at least that I can be certain of…
Seven was when I met my Annabella, the moment still fresh in my rotting mind. A newly vased bouquet of extravagant and thorny blue roses. My Annabella, like that feeling that you just can't explain, but you want very badly to… that was my Annabella.

It seems that when I nostalgise about the past, my memories resemble that of an old film being watched through an older film filter; blurry, out of focus, and infuriatingly sepia. But Annabella, god, she was different; she was my blue rose among a field of red roses. Annabella, her picture, her visage, was driven to me like a proverbial stake, breaking through the norm and hurting me in ways that I would not think would hurt. I close my eyes and she is as exact as she was many years ago. Burned into the deepest darkest catacombs of my mind, eating away at my sanity, a beautiful parasite more than eager to take me away… and what's to say I was not more than willing myself.

I might even go as far as to say that one will not, or has not, experienced true madness without seeing such a phenomenon. Like I said, my memories, and I am sure everyone else's memories are re-conveyed to them in the form of blurry, old
film-esque style. But when I see Annabella in the darkness of my eyelids, her form is true. That image, the first realization that she was mine, I remember everything. She wore her daunting sky blue dress resting upon her like a fitting curtain, with the green printed apples trimming the hem of its skirt. And her hair, she had it drooping lazily off to one side, as if to put it aside to get a better look of me. And her legs, dotted with the childhood injuries that one might expect from a little too much playing. But to me, dotted like the perfect cuts of a coagulated ruby, exhibited for the world to see. And finally… her eyes, those eyes, the eyes, those piercing eyes, blacketh of the night, shadow of the unknown. To me, she had the darkest, most unique eyes. Her pupils, larger than ordinary, but also the darkest shade of brown anyone can ever conceive…one might even call them black. This was not natural… the eyes, the recollection of her image, the darkness. In my mind, she was completely lit against a dark world. As if basking upon some alien light, the world around her black… a world struck with perpetual darkness… a world fated to never experience the light of day again.