marianne von edmund / two. cb fin

You think it'd be easier if you didn't remember your parents.

Or, not easier exactly—but certainly, well, something else. You'd be someone different, maybe, a girl with friends, a girl willing to try and make some. A girl with dreams. A girl who believed that fate was something you could change, something that you could make your own.

A girl with choices.

Every time you look in the mirror though, you ask yourself the same question over and over and over again: who put me together this way and why? It drives you crazy, wondering how this is your life, how you got here and why this is the way that you have to be. It makes you want to fucking choke all of the god damned time, makes you small, makes you cower into yourself until you are nothing a collection of bones and skin, less girl and more ghost.

It was all they wanted for you, to go to the academy and become something fantastic, to become something bigger than yourself, to ignore the place from which you came and become something that could transcend everything that the fates predicted you could become. Your mother was superstitious in all the worst ways, believed that everything could be predicted from a set of cards, and yet refused to listen to anything that wasn't what she wanted it to be, just let the bad things eat her alive from the inside out as she ignored them and pretended to believe that everything would be alright. It never made sense to you, why she would subject herself to something that she refused to listen to.

But she didn't listen. And it ruined her.

You think you're cursed because of it, think that no matter what you do, you're going to ruin the life of everyone who loves you. You're going to tear them into pieces, and no one will be able to stop you.

So you don't love anyone anymore.

And no one can love you.