From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 08:48:24 -0500
Subject: Beauty by 
Source: direct

Reply To: echonymph11@netscape.net


DISCLAIMER:	I do not own any of the characters 
or situations described in the X-Files, there 
is no infringement intended.

SUMMARY:  Mulder reflects of beauty.

ARCHIVE:  Are you serious?  Just take it!

CATEGORY:  Pre-XF musings


***BEAUTY***


Sometimes I think about childhood.

Not too much, mind you, because if I let my 
mind wander too far into the depths of it, I 
stop just seeing images of beaches and long 
walks and birthday candles.  When I think too 
hard, when I think too much, I think about the 
bad days.

But contrary to popular opinion, I don't think 
about the bad days much.

Mostly I think about home.

God, it was beautiful.  

I remember that the leaves on the vineyard were 
falling in swirls of crimson and gold, the air 
seemed like it should have smelled of pine 
trees and rising sap, but that's a false image.  

I can still smell the ocean, salty and spiced, 
the ocean smelled, *wild *.  Unrestrained, free 
and furious with its crashing and roaring 
whitecaps that fought the beach every morning 
and kissed the boulders that lined the rocky 
New England shores in the evenings.  We lived 
about half a mile from the shoreline, and my 
first memory as a child was one of the ocean, 
screaming with impetuous rage as the black 
waters tried to steal me from the safety of my 
mother's arms.  I remember being scared and 
hiding my face in the fleshy part of her.  She 
had whispered something in my ear, and then 
coaxed me to look around again.

That's when I knew I had fallen in love with 
the ocean. 

The black waves rose and fell, lived and died 
in seconds, but they went down fighting, and 
their nameless beauty caught me at a young age.  
In my mother's arms, held up above the water 
that was waist-deep to her, and over my head, I 
first felt that wind.  It rushed through me and 
into my soul.  

I think the ocean stole part of me that day.

My mother told me years later that after we 
walked home from the shore, I had a new 
defiance in my eyes, something that told her 
that I would be trouble in youth and worse with 
age.  Something that excited and frightened her 
maternal instincts all at once.  She said she 
saw new brilliance, but along with that gift of 
intellect came the natural urge to break free 
from her, to cast aside experience for the 
change to explore.

My God, do mothers know everything or do 
mothers just know everything?

And so life was quiet on the island for two 
more years.

And then one day when the wind was swirling in 
tones of copper and scarlet within the frames 
of the windows in my Grandmother's house, my 
mother and father brought home a screaming, 
angry bundle.

That was the difference between Samantha and I.  
I was born calm and placid like a frozen pond, 
people could glide on the surface and admire 
the beauty and depth beneath it, but no one 
could get through without fatal results.  

I became fiery and angry like the ocean.  
Samantha was born that way.  

And through childhood, our behavior and our 
actions patterned this without fail.  

When Samantha was one, she dared the 
impossible.  She managed to escape her crib, 
and before my parents realized that she was 
gone, she had gotten halfway to the ocean, just 
toddling along.  We all laughed about it in the 
end, we all thought that Sammy's pilgrimage was 
just coincidence.  But by four I managed to 
convince myself that Samantha was on an 
established path.  

A protege off to visit her mentor.  

A yet-crashing wave wandering off to visit the 
furious ocean that she had been borne of.

I didn't try that until I was ten.  And even 
then I had to bring someone with me.  

It wasn't Samantha.

I swear.

Okay, fine.  So what if it was.  

When she was five and I was nine, the fun 
really began, we were old enough that talking 
was okay with both of us, and young enough not 
to despise each other.  I suppose the island 
had something to do with that.  There aren't 
many year-round kids, families for that matter, 
that live on Martha's Vineyard.  The Summer 
explosion garnered us many new friends, 
dramatically faithful, sworn best-friends and 
blood brothers to the end.  We'd run away to 
secret hide-outs and do secret 'boy's only' 
things that drove Samantha mad between the 
months of June and September.  I remember girls 
that came to the island, blonde-haired and 
coquettishly bashful, throwing me sidelong 
grins and twinklings of their eyes.

My mother was doomed to summers of finding me 
lip-locked with yet another girl, and being 
forced to cover for me when 'Tammy' arrived, 
and I was still out with 'Danielle'.  

My father was thrilled and amused beyond words.  
My mother was ready to skin my father and I 
alive.  

What can I say, I was a ladies man, I may not 
have been for adventuring, but girls, I had 
that covered.  

So when Sam turned six and a boy from the 
mainland asked her out at a village carnival, 
my first reaction was to beat the crap out of 
him for three reasons:

1.  He was from the mainland, and duh, it was 
just fun to screw with them.

2.  He wanted to go out with my baby sister

3.  I knew * exactly * what he was doing.

I did not want to have to be around to pick of 
the pieces of my little sister's shattered 
heart.  

Of course, Samantha did not appreciate it when 
I punched her boyfriend when he was at our 
house for dinner.  My father and mother 
grounded me, and then my father un-grounded me 
and gave me five bucks for doing something that 
he had been wanting to do all evening.  

My dad and I got along great before-

See, now I have to stop myself. 

Where was I, oh yes, Samantha and her 
boyfriends.  Yes, she had a stream of beaus 
that outnumbered mine easily between June and 
September, only pausing her man-hunting when we 
were sent off to school.  There aren't that 
many schools on the island, and to tell the 
honest truth, no one with any money goes to 
them. At the end of September, Sam and I would 
pack up and get loaded onto the ferry, doomed 
to months of wretched misery at a boarding 
school on the mainland.  We had friends there, 
but the atmosphere was so constrictive, it was 
like slowly being strangled.  

So of course, when it reached the end of May, 
we packed again, this time with jubilation, and 
returned home to our island in time for the 
summer boom to do everything that we'd missed 
doing all through the year.  

Staying up to all hours of the night, midnight 
swims, bike races, telling ghost stories.

Driving mom insane.

And of course, the dating rituals started 
again.  

To tell the honest truth, we were well-known 
around the island, I guess infamous is a better 
word for it.  The Mulder family.  Stunningly 
beautiful, their words, not mine, brilliant, 
charming, trouble with a capital 'T'.  

Now, in hindsight, I realize that I didn't 
really need to loosen three of Danny Forester's 
teeth.  By the time Samantha was eight, she had 
broken so many hearts that it had become a 
topic of normal dinner conversation.  Sammy, 
who were you out swimming with today?  Sam, who 
was the flavor of the week today?  Who's coming 
for dinner, on which days, and what are they 
allergic to?  In the end, my mother threw up 
her hands in utter frustration, and bought us 
one of those magnetic calendars, we'd fill in 
who and when they were coming over.  This 
accomplished two things:

1.  My mother would plan her meals around what 
people could eat and how many there'd be.

2.  So we could remember their names.

Don't make any judgments, if you could, you'd 
do it in a second.  

Those were great days.  The morning dawned 
early, and we'd be off on our bikes with a 
bookbag full of snacks and comic books, 
sunblock and beach-bum gear.  We'd arrive at 
the beach before the mainlanders came and 
realized that the actual 'beach' was about one 
foot wide and three feet long, and that jagged 
rocks covered the rest of the shore.  We'd 
claim our rock and wait for our friends to 
arrive.  We'd go our separate ways and agree to 
meet back at the rock at six o'clock.  We'd 
both be back, hot and tired, but happy, and 
we'd ride back home at a leisurely pace, always 
in time to wash up and prepare for the 7:30 
dinner at the Mulder residence.  We'd eat and 
talk amongst ourselves and our guests until 
nine, and then mom and dad would go to sleep.  

And Sam and I would set up tent.  

We'd bring books and food and flashlights with 
us, and we'd talk all night.  She'd tell me 
what girls liked me, and I'd tell her what boys 
were trouble.  

This went on forever.

Well, until I was eleven. 

That was the summer I realized that hanging out 
with my baby sister all the time was something 
that only losers did.  

So I shunned her, it probably broke her heart 
and to this day I regret it.  But at night, 
we'd still have our tent-meetings, and one 
evening, I explained it.  She grinned and 
rolled her eyes.  She never bothered me in the 
daytime again. 

And through hazy summers of catching fireflies 
and first-loves, Samantha and I fell into 
carefully understood places.  She would get 
angry, and I would stay calm.  So calm that 
once I lost it, there'd be no stopping me.  I 
got passionate about everything, poetry, art, 
reading, whichever girl I seemed to like better 
than the others at the moment.  Samantha's wave 
kept hollering to be noticed, and my frozen 
pond kept swallowing people until the rage it 
consumed became too great and it exploded.  And 
then the ocean seemed to still long enough to 
keep the pond in its place.  

And those days were beautiful in their 
simplicity.  Beautiful in the fact that I was 
just a boy with a little sister, wrapped up in 
our lives like they were the center of the 
universe. 

And for those summer days we were.

And that life we led between the people we met, 
the ocean we courted, and the smiles we shared 
was everything.  

There's something so beautiful about my youth.  
I couldn't tell you what it was if I was locked 
in a room with it because it's one of those 
things that disguises itself as a tragedy, 
wrapping around it a gray mesh of tears and 
abuse.  You have to spend time to get through 
the layers, most people don't have the mental 
strength to do that, most people can't stand 
that loss long enough to get to that golden 
center of their lives.  

Samantha, tears and passion and rage and pain 
were spun into cloth and used to bind my 
childhood.  It took two decades of unknotting, 
cutting, unraveling, but it's come to the point 
where I can see the bits of gold peeking 
through the last of the rotting threads. 

And what I see through it is Samantha and I 
staring at jars of fireflies, swirling autumn, 
bleached winters, summer booms of friends and 
loves, fights.

Lots and lots of fights.

Backyard tents and burning Mother's Day 
breakfasts, secret pick-up games with my Dad 
under the stars, talking about nothing and 
everything.  Mom's cookies, how she's make an 
enormous batch of cookie dough, go out for more 
semisweet chips from the market in the town, 
and how she'd come back to an empty bowl.  
Night carnivals and early morning runs to the 
beach.  

The ocean.  

God, the ocean. 

The wind, the livid power of those shattering 
waves that ate away at the shoreline.  The 
harsh bellowing of the sea still runs through 
me, its uninhibited passion and its constant 
motion, that relentless pounding still playing 
in my mind.  

So Samantha and all she was still roars, and my 
calm and frozen pond is silent, still, 
listening to that wind and that sound of pure 
rage that is the angry black ocean.  

And I let Samantha and memories of my youth run 
through me like that first time I truly saw the 
sea. 

I feel the power of my youth.

And I recognize for the first time through the 
tattered wraps of darkness that my childhood 
was beautiful.  

Absolutely beautiful.

******

fin

******

All feedback is welcomed (and groveled for) at 
echonymph11@netscape.net