A story for you (2)

It wasn't that she had to do it. She had no genuine need to do what she did, neither was she in lack of anything.

But there they were, stacked in pretty rows, thrown in little baskets for her to sift through, available for her nimble, trained fingers to run over, to toy with. And sometimes, it just wasn't enough to sit in front of her computer to type, though she was good at that, too.

Come to think of it, she was unnaturally good at most things involving her hands. They called her a kinesthetic learner, and she saw the world around her not with her eyes, but through her fingertips, whether they were drenched in colorful paints and smeared against white paper or rubbed up against the rough, sandpapery bricks of the buildings that lined the icy streets she walked every day. She felt color and read people by touch. And even on the coldest days, when brutal winds would chafe the skin to bleeding, she never wore gloves.

Ever since she was young, she had an interest in building things with her hands, folding origami, writing, drawing.

Giving.

Taking.

It wasn't that she had some deep, uncovered mental issue, though some seemed to be convinced that she did. She wasn't greedy, morbid, impoverished, or harboring some buried event in her past that manifested itself through a rare psychological disorder. On the contrary, she was a rather bright person, extraordinarily amiable, her cheeriness only occasionally tinted by the cynicism of her realistic side that she touched base with every once in while when the lights were dim and exhaustion plagued her mental faculties. She was ambitious, just like most average people her age. But unlike most average people her age, she cared not for fame, or for fortune, or for luxury, recognition, or anything else that usually was assumed to accompany greatness.

Her only desire was to satisfy her hunger, a hunger that was insatiable by means of any material object that could possibly be offered to her on earth, and she had every talent and ability to acquire such objects if that was indeed what she wanted. But it wasn't.

The only things she ever wanted were those things that were intangible, those abstract concepts and twisted ideas that she ached to soak through her skin by touch, and she spent every excess second of her life finding ways to do so. But sometimes even the greatest thinkers of the past were frustrating. And sometimes when she could find no answers in the notes of melodic composers or the over-leafed pages of her books, or in the scarce intelligence that lay scattered around her in the form of mechanic human beings, she turned to the only thing left that could give her a brief, fleeting, yet undeniable moment of utter satisfaction.

The only thing that could break every social and moral boundary that tied her immovably to the frame that she wanted so desperately to shatter. It was passive. It was subtle. It was a crime.

And the feeling of being full and not hungry, though ephemeral it was, was still a good feeling nonetheless. It fed her like food did a Holocaust survivor. It kept her running until the next time...