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PennedinWhite — Crumpled Pages
Published: 2013-08-07 23:50:44 +0000 UTC; Views: 467; Favourites: 5; Downloads: 0
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Description
She sought refuge on a lone rock, watching small waves lap against the edges. It had been a beautiful day; one of new experiences and old acquaintances. As the sun was turning down its sheets and drifting below the horizon, shadows stretched from the boulders, wading in the water, with exhaustion from the day’s excitement. Ignoring the sun’s impending slumber, she remained motionless, consumed by troubling emotions.It was her book; words she had penned to paper from her life experiences. The words had brought tears of joy and the sense of accomplishment, but the feelings have long since faded. Replaced with the confusion and disappointment, she stared at the pages with a pained disgust. The words were jumbled; having lost the passion that had given them existence. The letters she saw, the words she read, were not her own. They were foreign from beginning to end, no longer an expression of her, but of another’s ideas. Her thoughts had been twisted into something unrecognizable. It grieved her to lay eyes upon the printed pages of what was once her reality.
She had once expressed pride for the collection of pages, but the humiliation she now felt was unbearable. One by one, pages were ripped from the spine, shaped into spheres of rejection. Each piece of crumpled paper, each brief moment that she heard the tearing of parchment, was a release from her torment. She relished the music of their destruction and the sight of the water quivering as she tossed the spheres onto the reflective surface.
“Freedom,” she whispered.
When she held the last page, she looked at it, detaching herself from its existence; knowing it did not belong to her, and she to it. Everything she dreamed of and all the passion she felt vanished. The words were once a part of her soul, but now they belonged to a stranger. She closed her heart to what the book had become. The sorrow for its destruction was no longer conveyed.
She tore the last page from the binding at a meticulous pace before casting it into the water with the others; watching the ripples dance around the crumpled pages.
“Freedom…”
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Comments: 10
Back in summer of 2001 my family and I took a three-week road trip through Nova Scotia. One of the campgrounds where we overnighted had access to a rocky beach, and there were one or two large boulders farther out from the shore that you could walk to and possibly climb up when the tide was out, but would be nearly submerged when it was in. Anyway, the point of that seeming aside is that the opening paragraph put me in mind of that place, and I'm imagining her perched up on one of those rocks, gazing off into the bay as the Sun descends and the evening mist moves in.
I'm hoping my next few observations don't come across as too harsh. I seek only to help you level up your writing.
I get the feeling that you're maybe not quite clear on how to deploy semicolons, since all five in this piece should be commas instead (or they're just typos that snuck through). It's a simple enough test to see if a semicolon works: replace the semicolon with a fullstop, and if both the new sentences can stand alone as complete clauses, it's fine to use a semicolon. If one or the other isn't a complete clause by itself, then the semicolon should be a comma instead. (E.g. in the first paragraph, "It had been a beautiful day" can stand on its own, but "one of new experiences and old acquaintances" is a sentence fragment and cannot, so the semicolon should be a comma to properly bind them together. The same thing is happening at the other four places you've got a semicolon.)
"... shadows stretched from the boulder, wading in the water, with exhaustion from the day's excitement." The comma between "water" and "with", while not necessarily grammatically incorrect, breaks the flow for me. It reads a lot better after removing that comma entirely.
"The words had brought tears of joy and the sense of accomplishment, but the feelings have long since faded." That sudden present tense popping up in a piece that is written in past tense is a sudden stumbling block and I had to go back over it twice the first time I read this piece. That "have" feels better as a "had" to me. I would have probably written it as "words had once brought" and "but those feelings", but that's just me, and your approach isn't wrong.
"... knowing it did not belong to her, and she to it." With the negative "did not" in the first half, I would change that "and" to a "nor" for better flow.
The Sun "turning down its sheets" is such a cozy metaphor for sunset, and "spheres of rejection" is just so perfect a description for crumpled-up paper. Fits equally well for a rejection letter scrunched up in anger and to personal writing balled up because the writer felt it was trash and they knew they could do better. There are also a lot of great parallels between tearing out and throwing away pages of a book, and discarding bits of the past that no longer serve a purpose in living the present or plotting for the future.
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Thanks for the feedback! This piece is sooooo old lol. It was on my previous account before I deactivated it. I might get back to it eventually, so thanks for your pointers.
I hope I have grown quite a bit in 5+ years, writing wise.
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Ha, damn, had I known it was an older one I might have skipped it in favour of something else. Feel kind of weird now for the grammar breakdown I gave since yeah, in 5+ years you've probably improved loads, but eh, there's always a chance that maybe someone else will glean some pointers from it.
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NO worries! It is always good to go back to some older pieces and perhaps give them new life.
I have it printed for when I have time to take a look at it with your suggestions!
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It really does feel like that when I look at my old writing
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This is extremely well written. 
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Thank you very much! I am glad you liked it.
And another thanks for the
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You're very welcome! ^-^ You earned it~
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