laurel b. everett {d8} {finished}

the slightly true story of
laurel b. everett.
(who planned to live an unusual life.)

Dear friend, as you know
Your flowers are withering
Your mother's gone insane
Your leaves have
Drifted away

✿ appearance.

I don't look my age. I know. It's cool. Seventeen year olds aren't supposed to look like their younger sisters. Everybody always thinks that Eunia is the older one (which is odd, because there are 4 years separating us, and a lot can happen to someone in 4 years - that someone being not me.) I'm used to it, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn't spend my time swinging from trees and instead do more 'grown up' things like sewing or drinking tea, but that's ever so boring and far from my intentions of what my life should be like when I finally start growing.

I have wood-coloured hair, cut rarely (and when it is, rushed), sprouting from an oval head that is home to normal human things, like two eyes (blue and prone to wander) , a nose (good at smelling, likes pine cones) and a mouth (20-something teeth that are a little crooked in places and taste buds that love sandwiches) . I suppose I look 'normal', but who's to judge that definition? I don't feel normal. Not all the time. Normal is one of those oh-so-terribly boring words like plain and tired and finish. A word I like to erase and replace with quirky or insightful or charismatic. But most people just call me delightfully odd, and I suppose I can settle for that.

The rest of my body is hidden underneath too-big clothes, sweaters dangling from my branches arms that hide hands that are sometimes too shy to say hello. (The rest of me, however, loves to meet others.) I suppose I'm average height (again, with the boring words! Even the word boring is starting to sound boring!) Aside from the too-big clothes (Mom says they match my extravagant personality - she's good with fun words, too) the rest of me skips instead of walks, peers instead of looks, shuffles and hops instead of runs, hunches over books rather that the television. (Sometimes, I stay in the garden with a book in my hands for such a long time that my Mom thinks I've sprouted roots and have become a tree myself. But it's not the garden per say that traps me in my books that I can be seen everywhere with (it's sort of a habit, but a good one - not like biting my nails which I do when I'm nervous and has resulted in terrible cuticle care) - it's the magic within their pages that keeps me entranced and I always come back for more.

But the clouds are clearing up
And I've come revelling
Burning incandescently
Like a bastard on
The burning sea

✿ personality.

The thing about me is that I can't help but fly high and end up falling in deep.

Because I get loads and loads of ideas, they spring to my mind like acrobats - but when I try to carry them out they never end up how I expect them to. Like when I take an idea, or a situation, and I think and think and think about it, and then everybody says that I "over-analyse things" or have "an interesting flair of inspiration". I climb higher and higher up a tree of inspiration and when I finally reach the top, it turns out I'm not actually as high as I first thought I would be.

Although I like to climb trees, I would recommend you don't attempt my climbing rituals, unless you have somebody very experienced (like me) to help you. Otherwise you may bump your head or fall out of a branch and end up with a very sore back. Tried and tested, this is true. Because Eunia fell out of the tree in the garden once when I was 11 and she was 7 and she'd decided to go looking for the little birds nest in one of the branches without me. Eunia is what I call a bird person. I'm a tree person. And a book person. And a climbing person, too. Whereas Eunia is a people-person, I prefer characters, figures crafted from ink and letters and syllables and the depths of people's imagination. I say what's on my mind and try to express my countless ideas through drawings (although, admittedly, I am rubbish at drawing. That's Eunia's thing, too. Being a drawing person.) I drift towards puddles, knick-knacks and leaves rather than personalities. We had to take tests at school to study our brains and the results said extroverted, intelligent, impulsive, slight lack of judgement, overbearing tendencies. At the time, I didn't really know what they meant - until I ran down to the Library in search of a dictionary (I've always wondered who writes those things, and how on Earth they could remember all of those words in alphabetical order) and scribbled out the definitions with my one-track mind.

So I came to discover that inside of my head and underneath the layers of imagination and the odd quirk or two lay a mixture of examining what is outside yourself (a world person), having or showing intelligence, especially of a high level (a thinking person), acting or done without forethought ( a doing person), an unintentional failure to notice or do something (a busy person) and unpleasantly or arrogantly domineering (a get-to-the-point person).

And I think that I agree with most of it. I try to constantly have at least one part of myself outside of the box - be it an arm, a finger, whatever I can manage to find. There's something that seems so dull about leading a normal, typical life. My teachers said I spent too much time with my head in books to be able to create my own story, but I have a habit (and slight savour) of proving people wrong. For if I am to live an unusual life, I must do my research first. That's where the books come in: doorways to inspirations, to other worlds, to places where I can go and see and jump and climb and cartwheel to my heart's content.

You're just like your father
Buried deep under the water
You're resting on your laurels
And stepping
On my toes

✿ history.

When I was younger, and I found myself placed in-between the branches of hundred-year-old trees, I felt like that was where I belonged. Not off of the ground completely, yet not so far up in which I would yearn to feel something underneath my feet again. Laurel, I would later find out, means tree. So perhaps I did belong there, amongst the branches and leaves and limbs that have seen many a winter pass by, held children just like me in its arms for generation after generation.

I planned to live up there, in the tree. Make my own fort, with a hammock and a basket tied with rope so people could send food up and down when it pleased me. (Only when my mother yelled at the top of her lungs with her best cross-face at 10pm "Laurel Beatrice, you get out of that tree right now and come have your dinner or I am confiscating your books!" Needless to say, I have never descended faster.) That was the days when my father first vanished into the world of Being Important, sending the odd message through friends-of-friends and poetry in the mailbox.

Dear B, he would write - because he always did like my middle name best - I write to you from the main offices of the District Mayor. The mayor, can you believe it? (I did, although recently the letters have become fewer and the tales more like fiction.) And the letters spoke of his adventures of Being Important, and what that detailed I'm terribly sorry that I must be absent for your birthday, B - but there's just so much to do before the Capitol arrives for the reaping. I shall make it up to you soon and send you a book, I know you like those. His books were never really interesting, all about Past Victors and History and other Utterly Boring things that I had already learnt in school. It was alright, I suppose - because I had the library and the books on my shelves to keep me company, and spent my days perfecting handstands and discovering nests in trees with Eunia.

After his departure, I tended to spend a lot more time in the trees than on the ground. Perhaps I was convinced that I must turn into one - rooted into the ground and unable to take off like he did. Twelve year olds are apparently not supposed to hang from branches by their legs and read upside-down, claiming that they're "looking at the world from a new perspective, of course!" as if adults don't know any better. Eunia grew older and so did I, and tears faded to laughter and our roots interlocked, but we grey apart. At first, she would cry for her Daddy - but I simply replaced his absent place with letters, convinced that he would return again someday. For the time being, he became a different kind of collection of pages and words that I was used to, but nonetheless an endless collection of stories from places far away. He was a faceless character, a figment of my imagination, a person made up of letters and words instead of memories and experiences. Our relationship was made up of secret letters inside tightly-sealed envelopes - never to be read, but there all the same, left to my imagination to conjure up their contents.

You come beating like moth's wings
Spastic and violently
Whipping me into a storm
Shaking me down
To the core

✿ info.


✿ { f c } alexis bledel
✿ { p l o t } lalia's library plot [based off the cedar b. hartley books]
✿ { s o n g } moths wings - passion pit
✿ { s t y l e } symbol coding style credit to lei w. permission
✿ { p a l e t t e } before the glow
✿ { c o d e w o r d } odair

But you run away from me
And you left me shimmering
Like diamond wedding rings
Spinning dizzily down
On the floor