This is a story I wrote a number of years back. I still like it, pretty much.
Her life was a life without effort, where everything was achieved without pain or struggle on her part, and the world flowed around her, it seemed, to make her path less difficult. She passed through her existence untroubled, until the day she realised that everything in the world was within her lazy grasp, except the one thing she knew she really wanted; brilliance.
She wanted to soar, and to shine. Yet she knew that to do so would require more than she had ever had. Sanity is a small price to pay for brilliance, she once said, and she meant it. All she wanted were stars in her eyes and a fire in her belly. At times throughout her life, she felt the tremor of the beast within her, knowing that it would lie asleep forever if she did not find the spark to light the fire in her belly and set her eyes aglow.
She began to surround herself with beauty, art which made her soul ache, in an effort to kindle her own flame.
She soon discovered, however, that while the infernos of others resonated with the beast inside her, they did not ignite hers. They were a reflection in her eyes that told her all she needed to know: she had to light the flame herself. And at night she thought of the art she had perceived and the multitude of creativity she had not yet experienced and she came to realise that everything she thought to create was already in existence, and had been dreamed by someone else. And she grew tired of her life, her life of effortless gliding, but also of ceaseless yearning, and she wished to end it.
In that instant, a thought came to her that was blinding in its simplicity, its clarity and its brilliance.
And she began to smile.
She invited the anybodies, the somebodies, the everybodies and the busybodies. They all came, intrigued. She greeted them at the door of her house, in a simple white dress. She invited them into the garden, where they saw a cairn of all the beautiful things she had gathered. She welcomed the people, the anybodies, busybodies, somebodies and everybodies, and began to speak of many things.
She told them of the Beast of Art within, and the fire she craved in her belly and the stars she craved in her eyes. She told them of a world that was drowning in art that was a rehash of the old, claiming to be new. She told them that an end was the creation of a new beginning.
Then she stepped up onto the cairn of beautiful things, and doused herself in fuel for the Beast of Art.
And with the tiniest of smiles and the words Sanity be damned,
She lit the flame.