WriteFridays Challenge 4- The painful beauty

I apologize for not posting last week’s challenge. I actually wrote large chunks of it, but then went out of town and forgot my notes at home. I plan to post challenge 3 next week when I am back home and on a more regular schedule again. In the meantime, here’s challenge 4, inspired by my current surroundings. Everything else is fiction, similarities to real people are purely coincidental!

Exercise 4: Your character holds a photograph that he or she just can’t let go. What is it about the scene depicted that holds their attention? Why has he or she been saving it all this time? Or, conversely, why has he or she made the decision to get rid of it? Where did it come from? Write a scene that tells your reader a little about the world in which your character lives through this photograph.

The Painful Beauty

The mountains. He hated the mountains. He hated them because of her. He used to love them, they were home to him. They looked beautiful in the photograph. For a moment, he stared at the snow-covered peaks, the rugged rocks and the dark trees clinging to the steep flanks. He felt a longing, mixed with that dull aching he always felt when he looked at the picture. Slowly, his eyes drifted from the beautiful nature in the background to the couple in the foreground of the picture. He had expected the familiar pain that came when his eyes met hers in the photograph. He almost welcomed it by now. She was stunning. She had always managed to take his breath away. The mountains were his first love, but she had stolen his heart. She had turned his world upside down. Taken his heart and smashed it. Not just dropped it, but smashed it.

He thought back to their time together, the lighthearted, carefree man he had been back then. They had met during a ski trip, had felt an instant connection and soon were inseparable. They had made plans for a future together. They had dreamed of a small, wooden house in the mountains with a front porch facing the sun, overlooking the valley, in the exact spot where the picture was taken. They were so happy to finally have found their future. Or so he had thought.

He saw his arm protectively wrapped around her shoulders, his forehead lightly touching her temple while she beamed to the camera. He saw a couple that was deeply in love, two people that were blissfully happy. To him, that’s what they had been back then, before she left and took his soul with him. 

She not only smashed his heart, when she left, she destroyed him. Only days after they had found this spot, had imagined their home there, kids, a normal life without the crazy schedules they both had kept, she betrayed him.

Betrayed. He has always felt that the word could not express what she had done to him. She had hurt him, stomped on his heart, stopped his world not only from turning but erased its existence.  When she went back on set just days after they had taken this picture together, she slept with her co-star and got caught by the press. She immediately spun a story about their secret love, bought the piece of land in the mountains and the last he heard, they wanted to build the future together that he had dreamed of with her. She cast him aside like an old shirt she did not want any more. There was not even a message, no call, no explanation. Just humiliation and pain.

He took a deep breath and lowered the picture, staring over the water beyond the flames of the campfire in front of him. He missed the mountains, but they reminded him of her. He now lived near the sea. He had avoided the mountains for the last 2 years, ever since the morning when he saw those pictures of her with him. Almost at the same time, he  got that call from a friend who had seen them.

He had kept nothing from their time together, just this picture, but that did not help much. First, there had been pictures of them everywhere he went and pitiful glances his way. When those stopped, there was just the pain inside him. The pain slowly mixed with anger and disappointment. It hurt but also made him numb. He stopped caring, about himself and about others. He stopped talking to his friends and family, until they slowly gave up. Now, he just got a quick call from his mother every few weeks. His old self was gone, as if it was locked into the picture he was holding.

He knew he needed to let go of the picture. He knew he had to let go of the anger and hate as well. He wanted the pain to stop and his life to start again. It would be a different life than the one he had had with her. But he knew that he would come out stronger.

His eyes focused on the flames in front of him and then glanced at the photograph in his hand. This was the first step into a new life.