lynette derose ⭒ d10

Preservation.

It is something that keeps the world turning. you preserve meat so it doesn't rot, you preserve your hopes, so you're not left an empty husk lacking the proper ability to dream. Perhaps that's a very... ugly outlook, but it still proves a valid point about how important it is to society- at least that’s what’s been echoed for a red-heads short lifespan.

The first moment she learnt about preservation was when she could barely hold a shovel upright, under the hot heat of the blazing sun and an array of meats from her father’s latest endeavour presented before her. Empty words went through one ear and out the other while the small youth struggled to keep track of the proper way of preserving meat so it'll be safe when it reaches the capitol.

It was what kept her family upright. Her grandparents, her great grandparents, her older sister, her cousins. They all worked together to preserve what they could. Oils, ice, papers, anything that would work. She was constantly surrounded by encouragements, assertions that they had one of the most important jobs.

But.

Lynette didn't understand it. An idle child, her mother would call her. Standing around their small factory, staring, wandering, doing anything but the families’ simple task. Soft chatter and careless questions were all she had to offer. Voices would yell, frustrations would boil over, but the young girl would always stay to herself. The voices of the adults, with faces wrinkled and incapable of being properly preserved would follow. About waiting for her to get older. To be able to comprehend better.

She was eight when she learnt about a form of preservation that she truly adored. Amidst a class that she need not remember, hair high upon her head, a perfect girl who time had preserved perfectly pulled out a flower she had held between the dirtied pages of a scribble-pad. A girl with the name of Alyssa, who would never leave her side. The flower, though bent awkwardly, looked to have been pressed perfectly. It was gifted to Lynette as an act of friendship, and she watched as it simply changed tint through the seasons, the winter, the fall. It stayed perfect, beautiful-

Lynette found peace in the beauty.

A book had been stolen from the schoolhouse. Thin, but with a cover hard and textured. She spent her days gathering and plucking whatever she set her sights on. Leaves, weeds, grains, dying flower buds and even bugs and worms. Her interest was budding curiosity. Most nights, her and her cousins shared rickety bed would be all the more unbalanced. Her cousin would complain, her words loud, accusatory. What she wouldn't know was a simple book being under one of the worn legs being the true cause of the beds jitters.

Things would squish, or stain the pages, and often she'd have to scrape them off the paper and try again. Proudly, she would showcase her wonderfully preserved art to her family, only to be met with lingering confusion and, on more than one occasion, unease. Perhaps the unsettledness came from the bugs, or the stains. The child was just glad to finally be preserving things like the rest of her family. This was what they had meant right? About how important keeping the starting state of objects were. It truly was beautiful, and Lynette could never grow tired of it.

As she grew, she longed to be able to keep more beautiful things in their current state. Things other than flowers, and grains, and leaves. The signs of decay surrounded her constantly, and despite the fact there was beauty in the cracks that lined the walls, in the wrinkles on the faces of the old, she longed to be able to stop things from changing. Her want want almost obsessive, and took over her mindset. But there wasn't beauty in obsession.

Efforts to keep things like fruits, walls, skin and hair in its original state would lead to oils being painted in places they should never be, strange smells haunting their small house and the neighbouring factory. Frustration and confusion were next to find their place in the girl. An incapability of properly understanding the true act of preservation. Friends, cautious, would provide alternatives, like creating paints to capture the beauty of a moment, or explain writing and the true wonder of words.

But these things could be destroyed, ruined. Permanence was important in the art of preservation. As she reached her teens, as she was forced to grow up, and face the true reality of her environment, as she sat and watched the screens before her and the waste of perfection, in needless destruction, she realised that despite everything she tried, everything would work against it.

Lynette put her heart into preserving what she could. She worked with her parents to help preserve the meats for their deliveries. She worked to try make oil-based pigments she'd apply to her book pages, creating scenes over what she'd pressed between pages, preserving memories in time. She would spoil her friends with gifts of pressed goods, only to remember their smiles and the way their eyes lit up in her mind.

But, memories were difficult to preserve.

Her aunt would die of infection when she was twelve. There was no way to properly keep a body from rotting, to keep her skin clear and her memory untainted by the ugliness of her final days. Lynette could barely distinguish memories of love and support with memories of pain and illness. Having to face the true fault in her way of thinking, Lynette seemed to withdraw further into herself.

It was Alyssa who kept her sane. Alyssa, and her curly hair, her dark eyes and her adoring grin. A face that had remained unchanged since they were small. Unchanged, and perfect. Her coping would result in Alyssa receiving pressed gifts and paints daily, just so Lynette could dream about perfection rather than the decomposition of all she valued. She was beauty, in it's purest form.

The smiles of loved ones, of her friends, of her family, She wanted their beauty to last as long as possible. They were the most important things to learn to preserve. Though difficult, amidst sickness, and pain, and labour, it was the most important thing to Lynette. And if she couldn't preserve them, and all they stood for in her life, all they'd done to keep her alive and keep her happy despite all she put them through with her hijinks, then wasn't that the truest sign of failure?

Her constant, forceful optimism, her constant need for things to stay in a single state, however, would always be her downfall. Because perfection, in a land meant to cultivate nothing but injury, pain and unease, is almost impossible to come by.

So. She worked to try become better for them. If somebody died, she worked to create a gift that represented them. Pressed flowers, a canvas of coloured oils, preserving their memory and offering whatever she could. When helping her cousin collect meat in the morning runs she would keep an eye out for one beautiful thing she could try preserve and take home, a flower, wheat, a butterfly. She always had a stockpile of gifts, just hoping to brighten somebodies day so she could keep the memory of them much happier then they'd typically be close to her heart.

Preserving memories, and a moment in time, was one of the most important things she could ever hope to do.