They fired carbon at the statue. Billowing plumes of thick black dust, in clouds like liquid flowing. Time and time again they fired, but the taint refused to adhere.
They thought it would stick to the corners at least, to make the depths of the details in the pure white plaster unclean. It did not. The features sparkled in spite of themselves through the dirty, drenching mist. And the carbon fell in gentle rains, away.
They threw heartbreak at my back. Time and time again, dark jets of pain and wanting. It was my fault as well. I was the one who was always falling, reaching, gasping in my attempts to be felled by the disaster of love that would not be. They threw disaster at my brain through mumbled phrases of appeasement and dreaming, set under the overtones of thiswillnevereverevereverbe.
I stood there like the statue of the woman assailed by demons of her own, contorted in fear and lost in silent meditations. Never moving, never changing.
They threw heartbreak at my back. It never stuck. It dissipated like the single winds of carbon through the air, and my heart was left, still clean after how many perils. It was left destined to fall again, without the scars of what it should have learned from the last time there to protect it.
I wonder what I lost in that stillness, and if innocence is worth the price it is bound to cost when its bearer has grown too old to be so fragile.
They fired carbon at the statue, but still it stood, unmarred. They placed it in the square where it belonged, and where rains and snows assailed it from all sides, and night closed in to the place where no one could tell if it was white or black or greyed.
It remained. Unprotected, unfinished.
They fired carbon at the statue to try to change into something it was not. It broke a hundred thousand times. But never changed. It simply tried to pull its pieces back together, awaiting the real storm out of doors. … It stared out blankly at its destiny through unseeing eyes, looking to the place where its whiteness might reflect the sun, and possibly make something more beautiful than jaded.