Raw Skin
It wasn't always like this, she thinks. There was a time when she was younger when she could look into this old, scratched up mirror and see an innocent, becoming girl instead of the dirty one she now views before her. There was a time where she could consider herself pretty, lovely even. But now when she traces the outline of the reflection, she can't help but notice all the curves that shouldn't be there, all the bones that shouldn't be showing, but maybe most importantly all the dirt that shouldn't be there.
The grime. The muck.
As she stares she's reminded of everything she's not and how even if she tries she's never going to accomplish anything. As she stares she observes the hopelessness and the desperation brimming the reflection's chocolate brown eyes that seem so huge in comparison to its face when caked with makeup. And then she wonders what would happen if all that makeup and those false conceptions were to just fall away. Were to just...disappear.
She figures that the likelihood of that ever happening was almost nonexistent, but if it were to happen, in some evil, cruel paradox of the world, the reflection would be shunned or even, perhaps worse, pitied.
She reaches towards the mirror and runs her fingers over the figure's face, covering it, like if she did so, maybe the reflection would just go away. Disperse in a horrid explosion of glass. Break and shatter and die.
But it doesn't and she laughs softly to herself at her foolishness. At her temporary misguided belief that the girl in the mirror's problems could be fixed by simply masking her eyes. But the laugh soon subsides and the reflection's eyes suddenly become scarily empty, devoid of all emotion, like the happiness that had been sprawled messily across her face had never existed and instead was imagined in a desperate attempt to convince her that the reflection could feel something. Could feel happiness.
At least, happiness that wasn't sick or twisted.
She scans the marks on the mirror, permanently etched into its glistening silver surface. One strike for each crime was how it started out, she supposes. She can't really recall because somewhere along the line it began to mesh with all the mistakes as well and she commonly confuses the mistakes with the crimes and how all the deep cuts in the mirror began. There's many marks and even though she knows the exact number of them she counts the scattered scars from the top down.
A small grin tugs at the corners of her mouth at her systematic and ironic counting. She always counts from the top down, just as she was once at the top, but now she feels like she's falling down, down, down. But soon the gist of the smile fades into a frown and tears are filling up her eyes, but she averts her attention from the mirror and looks down at the sink. She takes a deep breath and bites down on the sides of her mouth, refusing herself the satisfaction of crying. Crying would mean that she was allowing herself to feel emotion. To feel pity for herself nonetheless. And she didn't deserve that; to acknowledge that her life wasn't what it should have been. Could have been. After all, she wrought this upon herself.
So she bottles up her tears, although not without the fear that one day that bottle will become full and eventually spill. But today's not that day and it's not full yet so she revels in the fact that she's able to abstain from the self pity she so wants to feel for herself. At least that means she has some control in her life. That she can control herself in some way.
But she quickly winces because control was no way to describe it. She couldn't control anything. Not the things she said no to and certainly not the layers of dirt and mud cloaking her skin. As she looks at the sink in front of her, phantasmagoric memories of her childhood flitting in and out of her thoughts that were slowly and painfully wretched from her grasping clutches only to be replaced with the sinful flashbacks of the horrible things she had committed.
She flips on the sink, setting the water to a boiling heat and as she's waiting for it to reach the warmth she so desires, she grabs a small towel that she keeps hung on a bar next to the shower. Her eyes flash with hurt as she takes in the small amount of blood left in the silky material to stain and to soil.
She lets the towel soak in the water, watching as her fingers steam and burn until she's satisfied and then pours soap onto the cloth before spreading it out on her arm, grimacing when she feels the stinging burn of the fiery water on her skin. But, no, she doesn't pull it off and instead rubs it furiously against her skin over and over and over again. She slides it against her arm harshly, willing the dirt to come off. Willing all the pain to wash away.
She must rinse this all away.
Her arm soon becomes covered in a red rash which gives way to blood when the skin breaks and folds underneath her power, dying the white stained towel a dark red which makes her feel good. Elated. Ecstatic. It gives her a sick pleasure to know that she's purging herself from the very blood that carries her sinful nature. And so, even though the pain is nearing unbearable, she smiles, although it's broken. Shattered like a mirror that was tossed against the ground. It means nothing in the sullen, emotionless face. In the face that is merely a wisp of what it used to be.
When she starts to fatigue, she switches arms, intent on washing everything wrong she had done that day from her body. Intent on cleansing herself even though she's well aware that she can never truly become pure again. Perfect. But she has to try. She can't just let all the ugliness pile on her until she's barely recognizable. She has to at least get rid of some of the germs plaguing her.
Get rid of the evidence from the day as well as her past.
You may wonder why she does this to herself. Why she feels this constricting urge to harm herself in a futile attempt to feel whole again. To stitch herself back together again. How someone so seemingly beautiful can be so awful and disgusting. You might not be able to imagine a reason so grave as to feel the overwhelming draw to cleanse yourself daily. But to her, she can see no reason not to clean herself. Sees no reason to go a day without doing something such as this.
After all, she's a dirty, dirty person.
She continues to wash herself until she exhausts herself, all her energy depleted, but she still doesn't feel content. Feels like she missed so many spots and that no matter what she does, those stains will still be there because that's exactly what they were. Stains. They would be engraved into her skin forever. There was no escape. But she sees how bloody the towel is and knows that even if she wants to continue, she can't as she doesn't see any more completely white parts of the towel. So she clogs the drain, lets the water run until it makes a big puddle, and throws her towel in for the night, hoping that the water would coach all the grime from the cloth.
Besides, she thinks she hears a car so she quickly bandages up her arm so that it appears as if nothing had happened and throws on a sweatshirt even though it's a warm enough temperature for t-shirts. She shuts her bathroom door behind her with a quiet clang, wishing that none of the filth she shed this night would collect on her again even though she knows it will.
The door opens downstairs and she hears her parents' chattering fill up the lonely rooms of her house and she wants to go down and greet them. Hug them. Act like they're blissfully unaware of how dirty she is. But, no, she doesn't, because she's so tired from pretending and instead goes to lay on the floor by her bed.
She glances up at the clock before falling backwards onto the carpeted floor, not even slightly surprised that it's only four. She huddles herself into a ball and wishes that the floor was more comfortable and that she could lay on her bed, but it's contaminated and even though she is defiled as well, she can't bring herself to become even dirtier by laying on it's sin infested wretched pillow.
Unfortunately, she knows that before too long she'll be back on that bed, dirtying it even more with her...deeds. She shudders to herself in fear and closes her eyes, hoping that she can just drift away into sleep. Luckily, she does, but not for to long before she feels someone roughly shaking her awake, screaming in her ear.
She sits up with a jolt, startled.
"Why are you asleep? It's only five," comes a rough voice and she realizes that she forgot about Jade coming over. So she looks up at the black haired girl and smiles broadly, her previous disposition completely gone as it was now irrelevant.
"Hi Jade!" she says perkily like she didn't have a sink full of her blood in the bathroom. Like she didn't have bandages running up and down her arms. Like she wasn't broken. And, even though she so badly wants to frown because Jade reminds her so much of all those men, all those girls, she doesn't, and keeps up her facade. Because if she lost her facade, then who would she be?
Jade continues on about things she had planned, but Cat doesn't pay attention, distracted by her sinister looking hair and the rough way her face tensed and pulled into a displeased frown of disappointment. Recollections of the day that man forced her into his car and then the events from then on continually replaying themselves in her head along with the pleas for attention and the self loathing comments that spun through her head, shaking her core, questioning her existence.
Jade doesn't seem to notice anything though, so Cat continues to stare. Continues to watch as the other girl's curly hair brushes against her shoulder and bounces up and down.
.
When Jade leaves, she's left alone again in the solitude of her room. She wonders if Jade would have come if they hadn't of had to work on the project together. Wonders why Jade bothers to affiliate herself with someone like Cat when Jade knows that the red headed girl is tainted, imperfect.
She wonders if maybe Jade might not really be able to see all the dirt collecting on her skin, forever embedded into her very being. Stitched and sown into her heart as a forever testament of everything bad. She wonders if anyone besides her can truly see the ugly mess of sins and shadows and evil surrounding her body, encompassing her in its dark clutches so that she can never escape. She feels sinister. She feels like a fiend; the agent of the devil. She should have learned to say no. She should have realized that she didn't need to say yes all the time.
Cat glances at her vibrant pink bed and pictures the things that occurred there. The wretched wrongs that were committed that stole her sainthood and started her decline into an everlasting abyss of this...this emptiness that plagues her everyday, reminded her of how worthless she is and how alone she is. She shudders as the mental image of that...that man who raped her so long ago in that alleyway. The years she was held captive. And then the years when she returned home and gave herself up time and time again, the ability to say no lost somewhere along the line.
It was like her mouth could form the word, could shape the word, but her voice was weak and could never deliver, beaten down from years of being required to say yes.
She falls back onto the floor, curling up into a tight ball again, trying to drift off to sleep, but fear and paranoia keeping her awake, persisting that tomorrow won't bring anything better than today, so why go to sleep at all? In fact, why be here at all? But luckily she's able to block out all the noise of her mind with two sleeping pills from a bottle she keeps on her her desk, and falls into a heavy sleep but not without the dread of what a new day means.
.
She goes to school the next day, sits in class, talks to her friends animatedly, partly because she feels it's her responsibility too and partly because she feels that if she acts this way then she will become and embody that happiness that she portrays to her peers. Unfortunately, memories constantly bring her mood down as well as the fact that she's committing another sin, only this time to herself, because she was a firm believer that everyone should be true to themselves. In a desperate attempt to convince herself that she's not a hypocrite, she whispers under her breath that she's not really pretending to be someone else. No, she's just being a more smily, happier extension of herself.
And while she's whispering such lies to herself, she feels like she's being watched, which wasn't out of the norm. She glances around the halls and then smiles when she sees a boy with blonde hair staring at her. She waves at him and then winks in a flirtatious manner. The boy looks taken aback, smirks, and turns back to his friends and starts laughing. The rest of them laugh along as well and she can't help but frown at this open display of public shunning.
Fortunately, her friend comes over to distract her, but when Trina starts talking, it only causes her to think more so about the events at hand.
"You're such a whore. You know that, don't you?" Cat feels the urge to push Trina away, to scream at her and holler obscenities, but she's never been one for any act of violence, even with words, so she just blinks slowly and stares at Trina. The older Vega repeats what she said, but this time in a slow, mocking tone and it makes Cat wince, flinching at the harshness of what was being said. Wincing at the truth.
The rest of the day Cat spends as she would, things like this not getting to her as much as they used to. After awhile, she became used to the jeers and insults, accustomed to the treatment she receives. The treatment she deserves. Luckily, no one mentions Trina's outburst at the bubbly red head and Cat is largely distracted from the conversation until the end of the day where she sees Trina gathering books from her locker to go home, a few small crystal tears pulling at her eyes which were trained on the boy Cat winked at before.
Cat notices that the blonde boy is staring at her again, only this time when she returns his glance, he shyly looks away, his cheeks flushing a rosy red. Now normally she would walk over and talk to him, but suddenly she recognizes him and feels this wickedness overcome her. This hatred. This self-loathing.
He's Brandon, she thinks. He's the boy Trina likes.
It was to be expected that when she went home, she rubbed her skin raw again, except this time she rubbed at her face, or, more specifically, her eye. The next day, her eye was swollen shut and she told her friends that her brother had flung a pencil at her in an attempt to become the world's first archer of pencils, but it had hit her in the eye.
She wonders if the others are really stupid enough to believe or story or just to tired to ask.
And so the girl with the red hair was, or rather, wasn't. Everyday it seemed to be an ongoing internal fight, wrestling with herself, telling herself that on one hand she wasn't good enough, and on the other she, despite refusing to acknowledge it, pities herself. She wishes with all her might that she might be able to tell someone, but is scared. Fearful. Petrified that they might not care. That there's a chance that they think that she deserves this treatment as well. And it's so, so scary because what else is there left to do when you figure out you're really truly alone?
So she lives in this dark, sinister world. A world of such self-loathing and self-hatred that every night she attempts to rub herself clean, finding herself inadequate to walk around in public. Because sometimes there comes a point in a person's life where they realize that they are so messed up, so twisted and gnarled, that they have no chance to live a normal life. So they do only what they know. They keep to themselves, terrified that if they reach out then someone else will solidify their thoughts in that they are a horrible person.
And when it's realized to them that there really is no one that believes they are worthy, they finally accept that maybe they aren't even worthy enough to live on this earth.
And such was the mentality of the short red head, Caterina Valentine.
Note: Multi-chapter perhaps? Yes? No? :) You should maybe perhaps drop a review because I kinda like them sometimes a lot...Even if this was short. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! :)