(Eng) I Have Stood For Too Long In Their Shadow

My latest English assignment was to produce a piece of creative writing influenced by the sentence 'I have stood for too long in their shadow'. In all honesty, I was struggling quite a bit with this and searched a lot of quotes which makes up a lot of the text. I have adapted them to create my story line, this is a different type of writing to what I am normally comfortable with so feedback is very much appreciated.

A song she heard, of cold that gathers, like winter’s tongue, among the shadows, it rose like blackness, in the sky, that on volcano’s, vomit rise, a stone of ruin, from burn to chill, like black moonrise, her voice fell still…

She questioned everything she knew, why hadn't everything she ever wanted come true, why didn't it work out the way it should have? Everything she knew on how to be a good person, on how to do the right thing she had done. Yet, this was her fate.

What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?

She hated waiting. If she had one particular complaint, it was that her life seemed composed entirely of expectation. She expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact she could have accepted, were it not true that, just when she had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, she was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

She sometimes has moments of such despair, such despair... Because in those moments she starts to think that she will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because she has already begun to think that she has lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, she has cursed herself; because her nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time she hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around her in the whirlwind of life, she hears, she sees how people live - that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, the idea...

She realised all sort of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sort of things.

But then again, she was standing alone with no one to support her, she had given her all, her best, her everything but had received nothing in return. Her fight wasn't just, her fight wasn't over, despite everyone's belief.

She wanders, tirelessly, in search for somebody, for something, yet everything is dark, is black. She is in the shadows she always has been. Foolish, really, to think that she could be anywhere else.

Always believing that she can surpass this phase, this torment, she tries her hardest in everything she does to finally stand out into the light, even for a second. Her lust for happiness grows stronger each day but the long, cruel darkness grasps at her and pulls her back into the shadows, where she belongs.

Her realisation that she was put there by everybody else to prevent her success, to be the cause of their own; she feels ever more disheartened in her purpose, her ambition to find bliss. Her hope is the roaring flame in an opaque room, but their dismissal is the fierce wind which blows it out.

But then again, when will she ever realise that she would do so much better if she were to look at herself rather than at an image of her?

She is quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme – to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence is something to thank them for. She supposes her ‘blues’ are the price she has to pay for her temperament. They don’t allow her to be in their debt. They give her sensitiveness to beauty in all its form but the shadow of the gift goes with it.

When she dies, who is going to take care of her shadow? Or will it return to the night, from whence it came?

Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow, and all her thoughts were to find a way out. She jumped at the chance, ultimately landing on the harsh ground below.

So, don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing with you?