I'm looking at myself in a mirror for the first time in the longest two months of my seventeen-year lifetime.Mirrors have always been a sense of self-loathing and denial for me, whispering dark truths to me as I gaze at my limbo twin. The face is too long, the body too wide, facial imperfections like small ears, crooked nose, small scars. I remember the days when I used to be painfully thin, when the sensation of gnawing hunger in my stomach was a cause for more angry behavior, yet it made me feel awake and alive, and somehow grimly satisfied, like it somehow was causing me to lose weight by the second.
Maybe it wasn't the best time of my life, but I was thin and I could at least stand looking at myself in mirrors. What kind of life is it to live when you avoid certain areas of your own apartment because there are decorative mirrors or a number of reflective surfaces?
The little things like body lotions, brushing your hair a certain number of times a day, applying makeup, they don't exist to me anymore. Just a shower two to three times a week and then laying on unwashed bedsheets and feeling dirty all over again. The added stickiness of clear fluid and sometimes puss leaking out of untended self-inflicted wounds just contributes to the overall uncleanliness and depressed atmosphere.
It's like this apartment is my personal hell, no facades for other humans, no effort to please someone else's eyes. I always had believed that to be a good thing, but I've come to realize that lies and masks are what drag people through their every-torturous-day. Without it, with only yourself and maybe a few pictures that have stolen an image of what your used to be, what you could've still been, life seems very slow and pointless.
I'm wearing my dad's shirt, oversized and hanging off my frame as I nibble disinterestedly at the corner of a carrot, gazing listlessly out the dusty smeared window at the muggy sunshine and sluggish activity outside my self-imposed prison. Sometimes it leads me to wonder where Sasuke and Naruto are right now. I found out long ago about their feelings for one another, that I was the third wheel all along and that makes me feel...worse than any words could possibly express. If I look back now at all the times I pined after Sasuke, and he was looking at Naruto, or I was cruel to Naruto in an attempt to keep him away, and he had already stolen Sasuke's heart, and we could've all been chummy and fine, it makes bile rise in my throat at how lucky I was just to be accepted into their group, to spend time with them.
Kakashi and Naruto... they're with Sai, a replacement Sasuke. Right now, at this very moment, they're all looking for Sasuke, while I'm in here. My parents died over a year ago, all my friends have given up on me, and now it's like the cockroaches in my apartment are waiting to die so they can feast on my pale, scarred flesh.
How did it ever get to this point?
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Yes... I know the timeline is inaccurate, but intil the fifth paragraph I wasn't talking about Naruto XP and then I decided to turn it into a short fic...