because why not
disclaimer: i don't own the copyrighted material within
Marys knows why they name her Marys, but hates the name all the same. It's because it looks like a plural Mary, too close to the truth that makes her clench fists until crescents bloom sunset in her palms; it's because it's the same as her mother Dorys, and she'll never get her mother's love as long as she lives. So instead she takes her name and the way it clashes against Iosama (ee-oh-sah-mah, such an ugly combination of kanji-such a space oddity, just like her), and decides to weave it into her personal catastrophe.
She's a nuclear reactor in meltdown, but all her mother sees are knees too wobbly for roller skates and all her father sees is a mind prime to continue his legacy. They see green eyes and rosy cheeks and twintails, while Marys sees stars. Galaxies of stars, in a vacuum made for dancing, and all she wants to do is reach up and evaporate in the Milky Way. Wouldn't it be lovely, to change from green and brown to something brighter, something lovelier, something perfect? Indigo, and white, and black pushing the red out her veins.
It doesn't make sense, but never have chemical imbalances in a fragile adolescent's brain made sense. If Marys wants to be indigo, she will strap on her skates and hang herself over the edge of a skyscraper and dare San Fransokyo to have an earthquake. She will eavesdrop on the disembodied aliens, the starchildren haunting the moonlight, and color herself with their iniquity. She will dance, even though her father pulled her out of ballet and she dropped out of gymnastics. Listen the mania over radio frequencies directing her rockets into the stratosphere, and understand why she doesn't like to eat.
Never for too long of course, not when there are eyes on her. Green eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes, her mother's gray eyes frozen in a long-gone family portrait. Judging eyes, concerning and concerned eyes, Marys claws at her hips and thighs during bathroom breaks to relieve the tension of being her, of being
sick? Is that the word? All Marys wants is to die, on days where she doesn't want Hiro's arms around her right this second, or Nene's smile hiding behind a joke Marys made, or the stars spinning novae in the observatory just for her ears to taste. On road trips with her father, Marys turns on the car radio to hear the aliens talking electronica to Marys and their tongues lap under her fingernails, begging to itch. They talk to the sad Mary and the angry Mary and the curious Mary and the dying Mary and the living Mary and all the other Marys that make up Miss Marys Iosama. They tell her to kill herself, they appeal to the dying Mary who so desperately wants to end the madness, but Marys is her father's daughter, and she knows how to self-soothe. She picks up the rum bottle and soothes it with tequila, sparkling gold sunsets in the pit of her stomach to soothe the savage ache of "why?" Why all this hurt, for a girl with three meals a day and a full ride to SFIT and all these wonderful friends?
She doesn't know, so she dances. She steals Nene's skates even though they don't fit, and steals Honey's power purse even though chemicals stain her fingers bloody, and goes off to dance by the docks where the stars glow in the water. She makes a rocket with her body, flying by her ankles with the other starchildren until they blur and she blurs and the voices stop telling her to kill herself. Throw up a bomb and pray it lands on your head fast enough that you won't feel the burn, twist your knees together and pray you fall into the sea slow enough to feel the cold. In the dark Marys is indigo, and she laughs, laughs, laughs
she cries as she laughs, laughs as she cries, and wonders what it would be like to go supernova. To be so spectacular that your after-image glows in the galaxies for centuries, that astronomers on alien worlds will catalogue the history of your nuclear meltdown. Marys built the rockets that put the most current space station in orbit, she did it all herself, and next time she's strapping herself to a new rocket so she can taste the vacuum for herself. Cold, unfeling, indigo dark.
Gogo catches her, but Marys knows how to lie; of course she does, Dorys was her mother who gave her this ugly name, and there was no better liar than the ugly woman herself. Blame it on curiosity, since cats are quick to kill themselves, and whatever else that Gogo and the other responsible adults want to pin it on. Never her, where she hides her madness and lust beneath innocent green eyes. Whenever Nene and Hiro stare too closely, Marys feels the razor wire beneath her feet tighten like her smile, and soon the rockets will ignite; won't you join her in watching? Her father wants to put her in a ward, because he breaks into her room and sees her personal designs to send herself into space. Marys laughs in his face, because washing his hands of her will lost his last piece of Dorys, and if she can't have her love then what makes him think that he can?
She does not go to the ward, she goes to class and builds more rockets and saves San Fransokyo with the Big Heroes and continues to dance. Hiro loves her, as much as they know how to love, and he is a different kind of indigo that burns red in her cheeks and in her stomach and in her lips. Nene has lamictal and Marys knows that if she asks Nene will share it with her no questions asked...but Marys doesn't want it, quite yet. Marys knows what she wants, and sinking into a medication haze when all her body wants to do is sing word salad along with the radio is not what she wants.
Marys is 16 soon, and what she wants is to sleep with Hiro. It's technically illegal, but so was stealing a rival Chinese corporation's rocket specs in order to improve her own design, and Marys is at peace with the warlording aliens who invade her thoughts. She wants him, all of him-she wants him to yield, she wants the power to touch and to taste and to draw out beautiful feelings that glitter like star dust under a blacklight. Most of all, she wants him to want her, even though she is sick and crazy and will one day make headlines for finally reaching the vacuum that isolates her from the outside world
because maybe if he still wants her after knowing what it means to be an Indigo Girl, then there is hope yet for her
(she holds her breathe until her fingernails go purple, and spends the aching seconds spelling and re-spelling her name)
Originally, this was going to be a piece about mental illnesses that I have personal experience with. But then I listened to "Indigo Girl" by Lea D, and suddenly Marys was in space, which led me to schizophrenia. I'm actually unsure if Marys meets the definition of schizophrenia, since she doesn't have negative symptoms like flat emotions or inability to feel pleasure, but other illnesses such as schizoaffective disorder don't really fit either. Idk, either way Marys needs help and isn't getting it
Oh, and Happy New Year's Eve lmao