Inside the Cage
It could be described as misery for the sake of sweet fragility. She had a love of all things delicate and feminine, she draped herself in lace and bows, wore delicate little shoes from a bygone time, and smile demurely when she felt unsure of herself, which was all the time. She wasn't all sweetness and sugary and lace. She rolled her own cigarettes that smelled spicy like a warm liquor and left the scent clinging to her lips like the ghostly feeling of a kiss.
One day she was sailing on a strange sea, towards the blinding sun which burned a deep cherry red. The sea was glassy smooth. She rolled a spicy cigarette and scattered the rest of the loose tobacco on the glass water, blinking at her own alien reflection in the water, visage broken up by the chopped leaves. When gazing at herself lost its amusement, she struck a match to light her cigarette.
She placed the blacked and shrivelled match in the ashtray she kept on the bathtub's soap shelf. The tobacco still floated around her, pieces clinging to her wet skin. Smoke filled the miserable little bathroom, mixing with the steam from the hot water.
"Lila, you've been in there for half an hour, the rest of us need to shower! Some of us have jobs that we need to get to, and most of those jobs require we don't smell like ass!" a rapid and powerful knock on the bathroom door startled Lila out of her daze.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I lost track of time! I'll be out in a jiffy!" Lila said, standing up and towelling herself dry, then running the shower to send the pieces of loose tobacco down the drain.
She stepped out five minutes later to find the rest of the women of the halfway house standing there, in various stages of readiness and most wearing glares on their faces.
Lila walked past them and glided into her room, shutting the door. She started to towel her hair dry, then left it alone so it would form itself into soft waves. Lila glanced out the window, from which she could see the ocean. Sometimes she longed for it to be warm and turquoise, surrounded by palm trees, but it was the Atlantic, and it looked the same as it did every day: cold and windy and harshly blue.
Her desk looked like something out of the thirties, it was stocked with archaic beauty products and ancient perfume bottles. Lila always spent an hour at least doing her makeup. She likened it to painting. She was creating something beautiful, something to hide the face that had always been a monster to her. She had always been a monster.
She opened her eyes and yelled back at the stage director that she would be ready to go on in five minutes, so he could stop yelling. She smoothed out her leotard, then double-checked her tutu, this was her big show, she couldn't let anyone down. Taking one last look in the mirror, she powdered her face, and got up from her vanity, arms held out wide as she floated onto stage to grand applause.
Even the bright stage lights couldn't keep her from shivering. Lila shrank smaller inside her bulky knit sweater, the salty wind howling right through the holes. She held the cuffs of the sleeves in her hands, stretching the arms out. Someday the sleeves would just dangle past the sweater, too stretched out and useless for the sweater to be worn again. Lila would still wear the sweater though.
Lila watched the surf come rolling in. This was all she did, every day, she sat down on the rocks and watched the waves crash violently against the coast. It soothed her somehow, and she didn't question why it did. She rolled a cigarette and lit it with a match, watching the paper become stained with her lipstick.
Everything was stained by her lips, even the sea. Before her eyes she watched the ocean turn the same dull cherry as her lips. She got up from her perch on the rock and walked down to the beach, straight into the water. It turned her black boots red. Her legs became red, her skirt became red, and as she sank down into the water, her eyes became red.
"They told me you would be out here," a voice and a hand on her shoulder startled Lila.
Lila found that her mouth was sewn shut, she couldn't speak as she looked into Helga's bright blue eyes. Helga seemed not to expect a hello as she sat down on the rocks beside Lila.
"How are things going? They said you were out of treatment," Helga was twisting the fabric of her shirt up in her hands. It was almost like she didn't want to be here.
"Oh, yes, treatment went very well, I learned a lot there and I'm very glad I went," Lila said, smiling gently.
Helga's brow furrowed before she spoke ruthlessly, "Oh, yeah, right. You can't stand the sight of me right now. You're not glad you went, you're angry because you learned that you'll never be able to have the same coping strategy ever again. Speak to me like you're not Little Miss Perfect for once."
"I'm ever so sure I don't know what you're talking about," Lila told Helga.
"Then I'm wasting my time here," Helga got to her feet. "I should have left you there in that prison you made for yourself. You can't even see the good I did you! You can't even be yourself."
"Maybe because 'myself' is ugly," Lila whispered.
Helga stopped walking away, but didn't turn around. Lila nearly found herself slipping away into a dream, but she bit her lip and tugged on the sleeves of her sweater.
"It's not anything like Lila, or what Lila should be," Lila was still speaking quietly, hoping that the wind would carry her words out to sea, where they would be swallowed at a place where air and ocean become one. "I'm not who I should be."
"You're not. You don't even know who you should be any longer," Helga sounded disgusted as she began walking again.
Lila could hardly stop the tears from flowing. She imagined them floating upwards, into the sky, where they would mix with the clouds and fall as rain, onto the face of another crying person. Or maybe the rain would fall on the ocean, and she would be one with the salt water, and she would be as rough and unpredictable and harshly beautiful as the sea.
But she wasn't who she should be any longer. She never had been. She could be everything in her dreams, but they would always be dreams, as shimmering and gossamer as a spider's web, and just as easily destroyed.
–
Who knows what this is, I guess it was more of a writing exercise that something that actually has deep meaning put into it. Lila's a hard character to write, and I guess I was just testing the waters. Also, I find it hard to write about anything that's not concrete, so I wrote things a little bit more flowery and loose here. I found out that it would be very hard for me to write a whole story like this.