008 | cupid's chokehold

Start from the beginning
                                    

And when she is done, she looks in the mirror and does not see a girl- she sees a creature, a sad little creature who has climbed into the skin of a girl and pretended to be her, and has tried so hard to assimilate but just can't. At the end of the day, she is not a girl. She is not anything but a fleshy bag of sorrow and grief people call human.

She's in the prime of her life and still, nobody wants her. She is youthful and spry and she can leap and twist and bend, and sometimes she can face herself in the mirror without looking because she has been taught to see herself from the third person always, but nobody wants her.

Why does nobody want her? What is she doing wrong?

She screams and shrieks and pulls at her hair, wailing to the universe about why she can't just be beautiful like a girl. If she were just a girl, not this thing, she would be beautiful. How could the gods be so cruel as to leave her to drown in her misery and anguish?

Please, somebody! She is lovable, she swears, she is lovable and smooth and ripe, she is ready to be picked so, please! Pay attention!

She punches the mirror. And then she punches it again and again and again, and her knuckles are bleeding, and her hair is choppy and still, she is ugly. She can smash all the mirrors in the world but she will still have her face. She wishes nobody had eyes so nobody would ever have to see her.

She hates how her heart cries for him, a boy, the first person to ever see her. She thinks, bitterly, he would be the first one whose eyes would go.

She wishes they would just tell her she's ugly. She could let go of this hope, this praying nature that every night she will go to bed and miraculously wake up beautiful. If they told her she disgusted them she could move on, she could know that no matter how she tries, it will always be true. But they pretend she is beautiful, and that hurts the most.

If this hope is not a beggar, why does it keep showing at her doorstep asking to be let in? And why does she always let in back in? Why does her heart yearn so for thee?

She is angry and raw and red and filled with grief, but grief is just love that had nowhere to go. She thinks someday she will turn into grief. And she knows that because she grieves, she has not forgotten. She grieves because she remembers.

"Oh, Vivi." Enid Sinclair is not a doctor; nor a repairman; nor a mechanic. But as she hugged this girl, surrounded by long strands of dark, dark hair and dark, dark blood, she did her best to repair her. She picked up the broken shards of the mirror and brushed the tears from her face, bandaged up her knuckles, and kissed them lightly as Vivienna sobbed.

She thinks Enid Sinclair is an angel, in her world.

"What is wrong with me, Enid?" Vivienna gasped, lungs heaving as if somebody had taken a cigarette and burnt holes into her organs, her rotting organs. She must be a corpse, dead in all ways but the definition, walking amongst the living but not living herself.

"Nothing is wrong with you, Vivienna," Enid said gently, holding her face in her hands and brushing away all the tears that threatened to fall. Her tears, the same as the ocean, the same salty taste. The same raging tide, unstoppable and impending.

Vivienna shakes her head even as Enid holds it still. "There's something wrong with me!" She wails, pulling at her hair as she cries out. "Why won't anyone love me!?"

"I love you!" Enid cried, feeling her own tears build. "I love you, and so do Yoko and Ajax, and Xavier! And they wouldn't want to see you like this, sweetheart."

"I don't want to see me like this!" Vivienna shrieked. Her throat was raw, stinging with the emotion built up inside her body and mind, imploding inside her heart and stomach and mouth. "I hate being like this, what's wrong with me? Why can't I stop doing this? Why is it only me that is doing this?"

THE TELL-TALE HEART ,, xavier thorpeWhere stories live. Discover now