The Vault

Big Fishes' Carnival at The Lake - The Vault

I found it when I was a little 5-year-old girl who wished she could chase a butterfly straight to its home, hoping that a whole family of the flying colorful could amaze her even more. Nobody seemed to know where the vault was, even if the opening was large enough that it looked like a pimple on the grassland, so with that naïve mindset of mine I declare the vault my possession.

From then on, the vault was part of me. 

It was one handy thing to have – I could take many things from there that I could play with. I took colors, shapes, animals, and each day I pass with the vault were mesmerizing and every time I fell asleep, I did with a promise: to find the vault the next day. I could find it anywhere, though: the ceilings, the little pot that mom cared so much about, under the desk that seemed to marry father, everywhere. I took anything I had and painted nothing into something beautiful. Yep, that’s the word to describe my life back then: beautiful. Too bad no one was there to see it.

While I spent most of my childhood with whatever the vault could gave me, I started noticing more people in my life when I hit fifteen. Socially awkward, I still tried to maintain my friendship with them, yet not even one day did I forget about the vault. If it gets too tiring or too troublesome to talk to people, I would just find the vault mostly from inside my schoolbag – and got the stares when I played. Someone actually asked about what I was doing, and while both were confused as to why we couldn’t comprehend each other’s perspective, that particular guy seemed to be okay with it. What was that guy’s name again?

Let’s just call him Rome for now – I’m pretty sure that’s how his name sounds like. So this Rome, from that point onwards, started staying with me when I played the vault. I tried to show him what I could get from the vault, and while sometimes he seemed all excited over what I had painted in the air, I knew from his eyes that most of the times, he was faking it. I was okay with it back then, and sometimes having someone waiting right beside you after playing with the vault was not a bad feeling. Not a bad feeling at all. And then I thought, “why not?” So we started going out.

It wasn’t the romantic and cheesy kind of relationship, but rather, it was us accompanying each other most of the time. He liked reading, and while the introvert spent his time reading “good books”, I spent min with the vault I found among the library bookcase. Once, he tried to make me read one of his books, promising that it would be as fun as “your imaginary vault”, or so he said. It was a book about a futuristic world with high-tech cities and how morality had been wiped, replaced by a machine-like decision everywhere. It was okay, I guess, but it lacked the concrete feelings I had while playing with the vault. In a sense, I could create such thing in the vault and I could feel it. The “good book” he was always obsessed with felt like an overly restricted version of my vault; more like a part of another person’s.

It began to feel unpleasant as he continuously trying to make me read more stuff. So I began staying at home after school, playing with my vault. And when he asked me as to where I was, I threw away the fact that I’m playing into the vault, and said that I was feeling unwell. That was when I realized something… terrifying: I could throw something into the fault and it would never be found again. I started throwing the fact that I spent more time with the vault, and taking things like: I was busy with work, I was feeling under the weather, my mother seemed to need my assistance in her business, and so on. The vault was one useful thing, and soon enough it became necessary.

I didn’t think he liked the vault. I didn’t think the vault liked him.

As perfect for me as he could get, he was still human: vulnerable to the words of his peers. So he started taking advices he didn't need to. He blindly accepted that I was having some kind of special illness, and he was the only one close enough to try getting rid of it for me. I never knew this directly, but from every word he said, every worried eye he directed at me, every suggestion he threw at me, I could feel it: him trying to subtly, gently, trying to pull me away from the vault. No harm was ever intended, yet the fact that he believed them more than he believed in me made me... lose trust in him. Soon enough it was over, ending up in the deepest of the vault. Maybe his real name was somewhere around there.

 Although, it was never a pleasant feeling when I put everything away into the vault, and then realized there were someone that used to be there, waiting for you. The reticent orange sunset, the cheerful yellow sunrise, were somehow fading their colors, turning to the grey that was never found in the vault before. Yet something remained colorful, and that's him. Him laughing with his friends, him calmly reading books, him eating out together, him being happy. Often I threw some rocks I found from the vault, but of course, no physical pain was produced. I wonder if there were actually someone out there who could see the vault. As I continued the normal days without him, I didn't realize how had it come to me and him alone in the art room.

"I hope you're doing okay... on your own..."

Was that the best he could say? To assume that I'm doing okay, when obviously he was laughing and having fun with his friends, having no thoughts of me at all? Failing to come up with any words of my own, I tried groping inside the vault for something, and I found something that I had never seen before: a sphere. It looks like a vile cloud of black and purple, mixed together in chaos, yet it felt pure, and of importance. It perfectly fit in my hand, or should I say the opposite: my hand seemed to perfectly fit the sphere. Staring at it was disgusting, as if viscous goo was covering all of your body. And it reminded me of him laughing, him smiling, him receiving presents, him playing on the field; everything that I didn't. Why should he get all that goods if he was similar to me; the books his vaults?

As he turned his back on me to walk away, the sphere was no longer in my hand, but the knife was. It did me a favor, driving through the chest of one who did not appreciate the vault. I was fortunate that I could drench all his blood along with his body into the vault. It was unfortunate that a girl saw me did it.

In this world of prejudice and judging fingers, that was how you end your life, and start delaying your death. For every person that saw me with the blood on the vault, another sphere popped out, and another corpse get into the vault. It had changed, the vault. Now that it consumed mostly blood and hate, it became suffocating to start reaching my hand into it; so much red, so much resentment. Sometimes I could feel the vault trying to pull me inside, as if it considered me another corpse to consume. Living a life only to chase down witnesses to avoid the penalty, thinking about such a time I had on earth made me realize that perhaps it had no point. Perhaps I should just let myself into the vault. After all, wouldn't there be all the colors?