the people we are in real life.
by l. m. boulevardes
prologue: damaged goods.
This is who she is in real life –
She is messy, dirty, filthy, unable to scrub the stain away and unable to change the past (though she desperately wishes she could). She is impure, she is forever tainted because of what he did to her; she'll never forget it. She'll never forgive him. And even though she doesn't consider herself to be an especially weak person, when she remembers everything that happened then, she can come to no other conclusion than that she is, somewhere deep down inside, very weak. And this disturbs her.
It haunts her when she's sleeping, and it lingers in the back of her mind when she's awake. She wishes it wouldn't, that it would all go away – but it's under her skin, in her tissue and her blood and always, always linked to her whether she likes it or not. It's been this way since it happened, and she suspects it will be that way until she dies. It's unfortunate, but it happened – what can she do about it now? The one thing she has learned is that the past cannot be erase – no matter how much you wish it would be.