miriam otero / d3 / fin

After another incident of nearly burning her hair off with bleach, Miriam decides to dye it dark again. She leans over the bathroom counter, the chipped tiles already stained with dyes and paints, and colors her hair a deep brown. The ends she leaves, thinking she can get another color to dye them. Something like blue or purple. She knows her mother will be upset with her, going off and fucking with her hair again, but she can’t help it. She’s too impulsive, never thinking before acting.

Miriam exists in her own little world. She likes things to be her way— certain things color coded, other things perfectly lined up. When her system is disrupted, she gets nervous. She shakes her hands, paces around the room, even hours after it gets fixed. She finds it hard to let go of things. She’s a master at holding grudges, insistent on making sure that the people who’ve hurt her know they have.

People don’t understand the way her mind works, and she’s given up on trying to make them.

There are ghosts in her walls, spirits wailing and scratching at the drywall. Some days, she speaks with them. She curls up in a corner of her room and stares up at the ceiling and begs them to make sense. She wants to help them, why won’t they listen? Some days, she tries to fight with them. She slams her fists and kicks her feet into the wall over and over until she breaks through. Her mother always makes her fix every hole she makes, which she supposes is fair, but the smell of spackling paste never fails to make her sick.

People say that Miriam is crazy. She thinks, so what if she is? And who gets to decide what crazy means, anyway? Crazy could be anything that slightly deviates from the norm. She doesn’t think it’s fair that people get to label her. She’s been the same her entire life, the weird rituals, the ghosts, but nobody called her crazy until they noticed she acted strange. Nobody called her crazy when she was growing up, second daughter of a tired mother and an absent father. She was different than the other kids, not the best in school, speaking slower and more carefully, but she wasn’t crazy. Not yet. She knows it’s all about the way you’re perceived by others.

When she was thirteen, she saw somebody die in front of her. She had been walking back from school when she caught the eye of a man standing on top of a building. She had put her hand above her eyes to shield the sun and get a better glance, thought she recognized the man from somewhere, but couldn’t place just where. In that moment, they were the only two existing in that quiet back road. The man winked, before turning around, stepping backwards, and falling right off the edge of the building. It is true what they say about tragedies— you can’t look away, no matter how bad you know it’s going to be. Miriam stood frozen and watched his bones crack against the pavement, his brains spill out from his skull.

It was different than seeing somebody die on a screen. She’d seen kids die in the Hunger Games every year, over and over, in every different way. When somebody dies on a screen, you don’t smell the death. You don’t have to shift out of the way as their blood streams toward you. You don’t have to deal with the confused public, the Peacekeepers asking you what happened, them getting annoyed when you don’t have an answer. Of course she didn’t have an answer. She was thirteen, and she witnessed something she shouldn’t have.

She stopped speaking for a while after that. When she needed something, she would gesture, or she would shift her eyes. She refused to be clear about anything. People had to guess, and if they guessed wrong, she would not elaborate any further. She didn’t have the words to express how she was feeling, so there was no point in trying to speak. When she started speaking again, a year later, she would only speak in rhymes. Then, it was lines from poems she had read.

(Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.)

(Lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, I didn’t want to see it this way, everything eating everything in the end.)

When she was speaking normally again (but again, she thinks, what exactly is normal?), everybody assumed she had gotten over it. She knew better, knew that her problems had existed after the incident, and knew they would exist long after. Nobody was listening to her. Her family meant well, wanting nothing more than for her to better, but they were going about it the wrong way. Ignoring something does not fix it. It certainly does not make it better.

She thought to herself, I am going to explode.

The explosion was this— her hair hacked off, her bedroom window shattered, her left arm in a blue plaster cast. It was a cry for attention, for help. It worked. It was another terrible incident in her life, but she got what she wanted. She couldn’t be ignored any longer. People could call her crazy all they wanted, but she didn’t think there was anything crazy about needing help. People have an instinctual need to be recognized, to be cared for. She doesn’t think she’s bad for wanting that.