Distorted Perfection

Chapter I

The ringing resonated from an alarm clock, floating in the dimness of her barely conscious mind. The girl writhed on her bed, scrawny limbs wild and ivory cheeks feverishly flushed, fighting her invisible demons.

"Lexi?" a voice, comfortingly familiar, broke through the nightmarish wanderings of her mind. "Alexandra Meiqing Jiang! Gai qi chuang le! Wake up." That voice, speaking in her native Mandarin... Lexi stopped struggling against the force that still chained her and wrenched open her tightly shut eyes. Her mother's face, almond-shaped brown eyes impatient but concerned, met her gaze. No piercing emerald eyes or utter, chaotic darkness was visible. She was safe.

"Mama?" she murmured foolishly, realizing with a start that the chains she thought were strangling her had only been her sheets. "What time is it?"

"Time to wake up," the dark-haired woman sighed, shaking her head knowingly. "Hurry up and get dressed, or you'll be late for school. There's an algebra test today!"

Lexi untangled herself from the bedspread and rushed to obey, allow herself a sigh of her own. So it was only a nightmare, she thought with relief. Odd, for the dream had been so lifelike. None of it was real. But then, so were the goddess's eyes, that beautiful plain, and the peace she had felt, swallowing the darkness she was certain defined her soul. None of it was real.

Lexi stared out of the tiny window in her language arts portable, black eyes squinting behind her silver-rimmed lenses at the football team practicing calisthenics in the yard. She drummed slim fingers against the smooth wood of her desk, waiting as her teacher, the slight-figured, mousy-haired Ms. Portright, handed out the evaluations for the narratives they had written. She squirmed in the burgundy plastic chair that too large for her frail body, feeling a mixture of anxiety and apprehension jolt through her slight frame. Frowning, Lexi turned her body to glance around the classroom at her fellow students, who conversed nonchalantly or read silently. None of them were being plagued by the nerves that always bothered her before some sort of judgment was passed. She shouldn't be, either, not for a three-page long paper that counted on as an insignificant daily grade. It wasn't important, and too much worrying would only tax her, yet she continued her silent fretting. Why does this mean so much for me, anyway?

"Lexi Jiang," the teacher slipped a yellow rubric into the girl's unconsciously outstretched hand, bringing her back from the realms of rumination. Lexi frowned, smoothing the folds out of the paper before setting it back on her desk. Her bespectacled eyes scanned the loopy, black-ink script almost hungrily as she read to herself.

"Jiang, Alexandra: Fast-paced and original plot, language is descriptive and precise, if a bit flowery. Metaphors and analogies used effectively. Antagonist and supporting characters are well-developed, but heroine seems rather one-dimensional. Kindly, intelligent, valiant, and beautiful, exhibits definite lack of faults, unrealistic. It is advisable to further develop your protagonists, making them more believable and easier to relate to. Good attention to grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling. One typographical error."

The teachers spidery cursive continued across the black-bordered boxes, spelling out the usual, mundane linguistic drivel. Lexi, feeling tears of disappointment prickle behind her glasses, ridiculous for such an unimportant assignment, swiped at them impatiently with the back of her hand and scanned down to the bottom of the paper to find her overall score. It was a ninety-two.

Lexi crumpled the rubric up carelessly, in sharp contrast with the careful way she handled it before. She shoved into her language arts binder, biting her lip to prevent more prickles of discontent from burning her eyes. It was strange to think she would have been satisfied with such a grade in science or algebra- satisfied, and maybe even pleased. But it pained her ridiculously in writing, the one thing she felt she could do. Ms. Portright doesn't get it, the girl thought bitterly, letting brown-black hair swing in front of her face to hide resentment-red cheeks. What if she needed perfection, the little she could get? What if this pseudo-creation, giving life to imaginary people to fulfill her own needs, was her life? A can't change what I am, she thought with a confidence that she didn't quite feel.

Briskly, she shook herself out of her reflections, realizing just in time that the teacher was scribbling a journal prompt across the white board. The pearly yellow writing (why did teachers insist on using such a ridiculous color?) caught the harsh glow of the overhead fluorescent lighting and shone in blinding loops of color . "Write a poem, rhyming or non-rhyming, in any form, to describe your essence," she managed to discern. Essence? What the... Lexi shook her head- this was so unlike the humdrum teacher she had known that it must have come from one of the writing conventions Ms. Portright had attended last week. The thought made her smile to herself, but her amusement was replaced by worry when she remembered the many failed attempts she had made at poetry. I'm not a poet! she thought desperately, I'm a prose writer. Well, maybe not that, either, she amended, remember her evaluation and the ninety-two. But there was nothing to do but retrieve the composition notebook from under her desk and write

.Her mind moved sluggishly, refusing to function, as if she swam through a river of syrup, against the honeyed flow. What was essence? What was her essence? Her mind grasped desperately at whatever information she could distill. Night. Night and dreaming, she decided at last,. There was no loneliness or weakness hidden in the starlight. And no callous teachers passing judgment on her. Briefly, Lexi remembered the disorienting dream from the night before, but she had already started writing, her script becoming spidery and crooked as her mind and hand raced against one another and against time.

"Shattered rainbows in dusk-blank souls
Shards of light stab and silver moonbeams die
Weathered by tactless gales, the heralds of dawn
And sun rises, screaming silently, peeling back
Gentle, dark- clouded curtains to unearth
The constant chaos of reality, more unreal
Than fantasy, as true dreams evanesce
Swirling through jetsam of the daylight world
Of silent specters that fear the dark
And demons disguised as childish forms
Striking, expunging the protecting blackness
Hurtling me into the abyss of daylight
Searing, glaring rainbows burned into my eyes
An eternity to erase the suffering
But an eternity is much too long for me.

When moonset comes my silver dreams die
Folded like crumpled bat wings, black light
Monsters can't be seen behind dark gray veils
And dreams become shields from facing the world
When sunlight shows like piercing goddesses' eyes
I run toward the dusky labyrinth, my refuge
Of whispered words and fantasy, a silent poem
Fables that shield me from unforgiving reality
I hide from the specters with a pen as my sword
But it shatters when they break through the wall
Of woven dreams and pleas for darkness
I'm left, exposed, protected by naught
And I must offer a piece of my soul, a shard
Of scintillating poetry, a silent plea and compromise
Though I cannot betray the night.

The specters snatch and feed upon me, criticizing,
Ostracizing me from the warmth of society
But society has forsaken me, till dark
Is my only friend, my one benefactor
Protecting me, but defeated by sunlight
Amongst shadowed rainbows and wingless dreams
I continue to run, hoping not to battle
The specters that fear the truth of midnight,
Cutting like an austere silver sword
And shielded, my eyes, behind false rainbow veils
Showing me distorted perfection, as pain is destroying me
So I skulk among corners, live among lies
I know that I can never achieve; I have let my goals die
And I'm left with dreams in the starlit black night
But they, too, vanish as the silver moon fades.

And though I weep when the star-clad night falls
I treasure this truth from specter-fingers I pried
This is my haven, my angel-filled sky
And night is my one home, my true lullaby."

Lexi felt satisfaction, a strange pride at translating her fears into words, something that had always been hard for her. Then she paused, remembering the dream last night when the darkness had terrified her but the light had been her friend. She frowned, perplexed- that wasn't like her at all, she realized, but she had liked the feeling of not having to hide from sunlight. But then she shrugged, putting the feeling off as dream-nonsense, irrelevant, and turned her attention back to the poem.

Ms. Portright won't understand it, she thought, feeling a strange fury course through her at the thought of her poem, stripped of its meaning a marked down with that hateful black pen. No one will understand it. No one ever does.

But later, as she looked back in retrospect, she was wrong. Dead wrong.