Short story entitled "The Lock and Key Theory". A little too angst to submit to anything, but now here for your critique.

This is how beginnings are started:

She watches people race by beneath the giant pendulum, and she counts the seconds and minutes that pass by, her youthful time unspent. She watched him walk by, hunched over, at a pace slightly slower than the others. Her eyes follow him as he turns the corner. These were the things she couldn't -- and wouldn't -- understand; they were inexplicable and illogical.

She turns to return to her work, piling day by day upon her desk; obligations unwanted but slowly whiling time away. She turns back to feelings of familiarity instead of unwanted insecurities that would plague her at times like these.

This is how insecurities bloom:

She doesn’t know what to do. She finds her eyes unwillingly trailing his motions, awkward as they seem. Her friends catch her doing so and she cannot disregard them. He is a nobody, to her understanding, but seems to be everything to her. She's caught in-between time and space, enraptured with the sight of the otherworldly angel caught in turmoil ready to take the dive, the flight into the unknown, the oblivion.

This is unwanted and awkward confrontation:

He catches her in the library. The angel without wings turns and their eyes meet. She cannot turn away. They wait like this, minutes and hours confusing each other, until traces of Aurora threads weave through the brightening sky. Dusk into day -- it's quite simple now, the congregation of space and time and everything else in-between. The pendulum stops swinging, but only for a second. But words -- answers – usually superfluous, are naught today.

This is their congregation of time and space:

They don't see each other during the quiet weeks as peers but as strangers. They coexist without speaking and share the tiny world they live in. They do not speak.

She observes him and takes note sometimes, writing down in her perfect cultured handwriting that he regresses slowly as the pendulum swings. His limbs, typically slender and sinewy, have gone limp. Her concern for him grows. Her friends do not utter a word upon glancing at her face.

This is the realization:

She encounters him one day. Trapped within a corner, he is a wildcat. His gaze steadily holds her. Blue meets brown. There is a silence for a moment. He turns his head to leave, and she wonders—this caged beast, trapped within bounds, completely unapproachable by society’s standards-- if she thinks about it long and hard, there is a metaphor staring at her in the face and it all makes sense.

This is wrong:

They continue to talk in muted tones and shifty eyes. Should someone see them would the reaction be an enactment of chaos? Speaking to each other in hushed tones as if the world outside is silent. She knows she is a coward.

This is the end of their beginning:

They both are cowards – turning back to an enclave where neither can be found. Where people turn their backs and overlook their differences. But they turn to face the severe light, glaring at them with its evil eye. Too many people, a hundred against one, predator to prey. They're vulnerable. The walls are quickly tumbling down.

This is the end in which all things spring:

They part their ways. Neither looking back to the place where all things originated: where insecurities will lie forever dormant, where a secret can be kept and an oath never broken. Remorse and regrets tossed aside into a gale, a whirlwind of emotions. Society frowns down upon them.

This is coincidence, chance, fate at play:

They're back where they started. The red string of fate has knotted them together. Pressures rising, soul escalation, nerve endings electrifying and senses on overdrive. In a broken world, divine interventions are only cracks and minute dents; they bear no positive effect except to exist. In a broken world, where fate frowns upon them he will take the dive. And she? She will go after him.

This is the intervention:

The pendulum stops swinging for the two. It is a cruel cycle that both should want to abstain from uttering a word in order to save each other in front of the world.

This is the end of their storybook.

… Now all things fall into place.


Anonymous
10:03:57 PM