D6 ☤ { Emilie Arden } ☤ DONE

I only knew how to exist when I was wanted.

But girls like us are never wanted. We intrigue. We interest and concern and seduce without so much as a siren song. We're the girls they open car doors for and end up taking home, but they'll never bend at the knee for our sort. We'll be scouted and sought after to book and pose and appear absolutely ethereal under scorching lights that blind our view of heaven. But we’ll never be wanted. We become war-torn and battered in this battle to be warm because the skin on our bones is stretched out so thinly the cold words of a rejection can freeze our marrow. The deeper we can dig the trenches about our faces and necks and ribs, the quicker we’re told we can win the war and taste the sweet fruits of victory. So we put down every scented and spiced grenade, because the taste of success is unlike no other. The struggle to fit into the portrait of an ideal woman, to fit into a size goddamn double zero, was far more difficult and involved far more agony than the lip gloss queen on my television screen had led me to believe. Because girls like us can never be enough. We're bred with craters in our hearts, the type of emptiness only fathers' kisses and chocolate cake can fill. But we're conditioned to believe it's a matter of thirteen consecutive skipped meals and a little sheet of paper on the tongue to feel whole again. I memorized its force; its weight and after-burning sting. The feel of a backhand slap. The feel of a 160 pound man pressing the air out of your lungs with a designer shoe reminds you of just how sweetened each molecule of oxygen really is, far sweeter than any pastry could've been.

Girls like us are bombarded with it everyday. "Pig!" "Slut!" "Horse face!" "Ugly cow!" The kind of ammunition that cuts fresh wounds surgeons can't sew shut. And our gashes pour out all that's left of us unto the ground we leave behind. Crimson colored ambitions and self-love and identity spill out under our feet and appear something foreign. "Emilie" doesn't have a favorite song, but she wears sunglasses at the beach. "Emilie" hasn't seen her mother in six years, but looks great in pinstripes. "Emilie" forgot the name of her bestfriend, but she walks amongst the prettiest this district has to offer. "Emilie" downs three bottles of vodka every night to wash away an arc of misery anchored in her chest and can't stop crying, but she's never had a single blemish. On the magazine cover her eyelashes are long and curled and her waist is the thinnest you've ever seen. She has it all.

They told us the need for flesh died out long ago, along with chivalry, romance, and disco. Amaretto can keep you warm. And it was just as they described it. A honey colored blanket of misplaced steps and drunken sobbing at two in the morning. She was bitter and she was sweet and she was cruel and she was kind. She drowned out the unbearable hunger and, in response to my shots and binges of thanks, threw me down a flight of stairs. Cigarettes can keep you warm. They lit me up from within, I felt a distant relative of life spark within me and try its best to remind me of a time when my blood ran hot and full of purpose. They seasoned all that entered my mouth with the zest of ashes and blood, and curbed the hunger that gnawed at the fringe of my consciousness. But the flicker of hope dulled out after the first thirty low-tars, and the chilling bite of nakedness ravaged my temple once more. A man can keep you warm. But betraying my body for two minutes of company just left me reaching for the Amaretto again.

”Private parts,” my mom called my most intimate bits and pieces when I was still young enough to fit all of me into the crook of her arm, the cradle of the only warmth I know I’ve known and the softest skin that hugged me far better than my choking latches of denim ever could. She looked at me sternly and told me my private parts were not to be given away lightly. That our private parts were ours to own and owe nobody nothing.

I never gave away my private parts. The real intimate substance my mouth was too cowardly to word. Cameras have drunken every inch of me, not a nook on my body is left as unchartered waters. But the deafening regrets that blur beneath my eyelids when I’m alone at night trying to silence them with sleep. The searing anxiety that ignites my every tendon, the molasses of my blood, thick with the exact morphling glaze I’m sure will end me. The nasty thoughts that speak of an end when the speaking stops and the thinking begins. When I’m alone the private parts between my ears beg for solace to all that’s killing me, but I’ve never given away a single one. No one ever heard the words I embedded across my face but didn't dare say aloud. A private part of me wanted all of me to die; the only private part I kept for myself.

…….

There was no sky above or ground below, just mirrors. All around me reflecting reflections of reflecting reflections of myself spun in circles, horrified at the hell that was waiting for me.

Hell is spending eternity surrounded by every person you have ever hated, watching you. The people who weighed your heart down with so much detest it stopped humming its natural anthem and began sounding an alarm. A call to action beckoning Paranoia and Discord to arm themselves against spiteful eyes. And they filled my eyes, the people I hated most. They that reminded me of all my shortcomings and stains. I jerked my body left, snapped my head right and up. A complete turn, facing down. Spin right, look over right shoulder. They filled my eyes to the brim, visions filled with the venom of hate. Even shutting my eyes, letting the tears flood out in the sighs between them. They stared on. In the dark abyss behind closed lids, their phantom stares grinned at me.

I was everywhere.

Staring back at me, no matter where I turned, tenfold. I hated no one more than I hated myself. I hated nothing more than the under-plump lips that kissed too carelessly and could drink a liquor ocean dry. The stringy locks draped unto my scalp so serrated and fried I had forgotten what it looked like when nature had a say in its growth. My eyes were far too big for my face, my limbs too long, and I was practically sexless from my lack of curves. And I hated! hated! hated! myself in every definition of the word. I hated that mouth that kept food out and my pleads for help in. I hated that face that turned from anyone who ever loved me and faced the knuckles of faceless lovers. I hated that hand that carved my name into that "Nine Year Contract" death warrant and executed everything I was.

I ran from them all. I ran into halls of identical fixations and into walls of myself. But not myself at all. The more I ran, the uglier I became. My reflections showed my nose peeling back to reveal a pig snout, my skin burning off in chunks of painted flesh to reveal emerald green and diamond hard scales beneath. My screams were the only bayonets to pierce through the stunning silence, bouncing back and forth between the narrow glass walls in a sick choir of suedocompany. With each step I'd feel something tear through my skin or melt off or give way to a new horror reflected back at me a thousand times from every angle my eyes could perceive. My tears were my only form of solace against this, blurring my vision and sparing me seconds of relief from what I've become, what I was both chasing and running from.

Time was irrelevant in hell. When undiluted terror shocks your every bone you can't tell the difference between seconds and days, moments and lifetimes. All you do is look for a lifeline among the mess of horror, a string of hope to pull you up and out of the endless freefall. And it might have taken me five minutes, it felt like both five seconds and five years, to find that damned doorway. The single breach in the mirror house that I, or the me beneath the three foot long fangs and bleeding eyes, could not reach. And I'm sure my tears were entirely for something new, that when I found the arch of light I screamed for something other than desperation of escape. For a fragment of a second, I realized how happy I was to have my life back and given a second chance to live unhurt and reignite those dreams I lost in the insomnia warfare so long ago and see my mother again and promise to never let her go and recollect the remains of the love I had for myself and piece them together with bleeding hands and find that

There was no sky above or ground below, just mirrors.

Even in death I could not be free.

…….

”Why, Miss Arden? Why’d you do it?”

Doe eyes and a pair of frail shoulders, shuddering beneath the weight of an anonymous burden I had forgotten how to name can answer any question, I’ve learned, if you’re pretty enough.

”I-I-I d-don’t know why I-I did-d-d it…. W-why’d-d-d I do it?”

A chemical imbalance, apparently. Too much of one thing, not enough of another. Stark blanche coats told me about myself, educated me on the sole topic I spent a lifetime knowing.

But the austere “matter-of-fact”s and statistics painted unto the militia of sheets bound by their medicinal authorities can’t diagnose my kind of breed. My kind of strain that was taught to be infallible, to deny frailty any access to my body, to hate the look and the color and the weight and the feel and the size of “humanity”. We’re the sickness alive in the eyes and the untouched plates and the tear-drenched pillows and the chemical-stained hair and the scarlet tally marks etched into thin wrists dripping into the bloodied bathroom sinks of the younger. Their biology texts couldn’t accurately remedy me because all they’ve ever known was the study of life.

I tried to kill myself because I thought I wanted to die.

But all I wanted was to start living.

It wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out
If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted all the time