[justify]

quartz elle stonewall
district four // eighteen // female

appearance

[justify]"sometimes i think it's difficult for beautiful girls. people don't see past their looks."

On overcast days where the light is just right: not too dark to cloak your vision in shadow, nor too bright to blind yourself from what is standing right in front of you, you can see your reflection in pools of water. It stares back at you, a perfect outer shell of you created not by man-made mirrors or sheet of glass, but by the complete and utter mystery that is mother nature. The water shows you what others see. It mimics your every move, your every blink, your every breath. But touch your reflection, and it distorts, rippling across the transparent surface. Now the water has consumed your entire being, the distortions and waves and bumpy currents that flaw a reflection that blinked back at you.

The water knew your shell. Now, it knows your layers.

Can you hear it laughing? Underneath the blonde, sea-soaked strands that cling to your skin for warmth - yet their icy touch causes your body to shiver under a slowing pulse that races through your veins as blue as the water below - it cackles. Never trust anything that doesn't reveal its deepest secrets. You should never attempt to cross a river without testing how deep it is. Neither should you jump into the ocean without knowing there aren't rocks right beneath your limbs before they snap and break like twigs. It howls with a ferocious mockery of the scar that trails across your knee where they cut you wide open 'till you grinned. Because the water doesn't just show you the scars that litter your skin underneath your clothes, it shows the ones under your skin, too.

Blue eyes blink back at you: once, they look curious, twice, they look lost, three times and they almost seem happy again. Your eyes are playing tricks on you, my dear. You could have sworn that for a moment, in the rippling currents they glared back at you with a ferocity that shook through your sun-stained skin and settled in your bones cracked and mended by doctors and time that ticks on. How long will you stay there, huddled by the edge of the salty sea? So small you look, so weak. Every inch of you once strived to hide all of this behind a veil of a stranger that you wore for years. Now there is nobody to hide from but the ocean below and all of its secrets that it absorbs - yours too, underneath the surface. So sad, you look, so sullen, so sunken in doubt and grief and purple bruises underneath your eyes that mark where the night kissed you goodnight but kept you awake. I can change that, the water calls, your freezing lips moving in your reflection. (Whether it's the ripples of the wind or your own mind slowly slipping is unclear - but then again, so is everything else these days.) I can make you whole again. Just come on in, we won't keep you long.

So you breathe in once, and take the plunge.[/justify]

[justify]