Family Portrait

At first glance, it all seems like one beautiful, detailed design.  
Look closer, you’ll see that it’s far more intricate than just that.

Every twirl is an illusion. Illusions of peace, love and an end to enmity. As they spiral further into themselves, everything is lost. Meaning, definition and lastly, the essence of what once was. A time of laughter that with the screams and cries of torn women was turned into an age of darkness and weeping. Every seemingly straight line bears the beginning of many, almost invisible, cracks. The flowers are blooming in majesty, their petals rising to the sun. Yet their centers are a web of lies and lives, intersecting, intertwining and eventually collapsing on each other. Branches, so alike, yet so different. So different that they can never meet without causing the ground around them to shake.
And even as specks of what may be hope seem to form, they begin to shrink, ultimately disappearing.

She doesn’t look at my face, yet she pours out the tears of her mother, the cries of her little sisters and her father’s screams into the palm of my hand. Her hand does not waver as she paints her family portrait, connecting everything and everyone together with swift movements of her wrist. Her life now connects with mine, as the dark substance stains my already impure skin, seeping into the microscopic nooks and crevices that lay etched into my skin.

As I walk away, the picture begins to dry and suddenly everything is clear. Why her mother weeps at night after her father thrashes her mercilessly. Why her little sister is so afraid to speak. Why she herself cannot look at her father without writhing in shame and guilt. I do not see the tears forming in her eyes, yet they are there, like the minute details commonly overlooked in every picture. She sits there, her face shrouded in darkness, her eyes the only passages to her soul. And they too are misted over.

I look down and watch as everything starts to fall apart.