This is a creative writing piece for my first year minor at university. It was written years ago (2007?), for the now inactive everyone sitdiary, a colaborative journal with a public password. The pice was slightly refined for submission. It's certainly not my best work.

Bedazzled

It was the most striking sculpture he'd ever seen, curved to natural perfection, encrusted with dazzling jewels that lit up like tiny suns and mirror eyes that reflected the sorrow in his soul. The boy stood and stared in the middle of the street, captivated by this amazing figure of an immaculate person. It was so flawless it seemed alien, almost too attractive to be human. It stood proud like the most gorgeous of all heaven's angels, upon its pedestal in the centre of the tiny town. The bewildering thing about it was that it could only have been crafted by the hands of common folk. There were no more artists in his world, nobody who could ever have poured into it the love that had shaped in such a splendid way... So how could it be so radiant? It was an irrelevant mystery. What mattered was that she was beautiful.

At first the boy paid short, infrequent visits, since he had other errands to attend to - commitments to friends and family, and a well-paying job - but as time progressed his passing-bys became sit-ins, as the rest of the world faded away and this incredible piece of art became everything to him.

The world seemed different now that she was in it. Unlike in movies and story books, where everything around a character becomes bright and glowing when they fall in love, his experience of life became grey and mundane beyond her.

He'd started out as a little distracted, but gradually, as his obsession grew, he became trapped in a downward spiral of self sacrifice. Friends gradually merged into the fog that was his world beyond her. By the 3rd month of fantasy he'd stopped returning their calls, so they'd stopped making the futile effort of attempting contact. They could no longer connect with the dazed, absent boy they thought they once knew. His work faded away a long before that, he was fired after two weeks of no appearances, but he didn't care. He didn't even realise. His world was her now.

Eventually his need grew too strong, and at 3am one grey night he stole the statue away. It seemed that nobody would notice, they never even paid attention to her, and even if they did, they couldn't show her the appreciation he could. Now he was able to spend every waking moment with the woman he loved.

At first she was warm to his touch, and he felt her love him back. He could slide his hands across her curves and feel the connection between man and marble. Her warmth was a solace to him, it lifted him up and filled him with colour and life. But the longer he spent with her, the cooler she became. He thought to give her space, and left her, even for weeks at a time, but when he returned she was colder than before. Soon it pained him to touch her, her frozen icy surface burning his skin. His hands became scabbed and scarred. But he refused to give up hope, and over the next month built a huge incubator for her. It was almost equal to her in it's grand complexity, and he was even slightly proud of himself when he finally completed her gift. He wrapped it around her, his great huge warming hug machine. But when he returned to her the next day he found, once again, she had not changed. She was not warmer. Puzzled, he decided his creation was surely faulty. He proceeded to craft an incubator that would be larger, better, and flawless. This task would take him years, building on what he'd already made until the hug machine dwarfed his object of worship.

For all his efforts he would only suffer. It made no difference, no matter how much he tried. He spent the rest of his life trying to warm her up, eventually dying in the process from exhaustion and malnutrition having dedicated every last bit of energy to her. It never once occurred to him that the cold was not coming from outside, that his own creation only served as a wall between him and the truth, and that no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried to keep her warm, he could never change what she was inside.