This is for tatimac since no one else has reviewed yet *cough cough*
A few months ago…
She lay in the white bed with plain walls. Thinking.
No more than a week it had been since she had had everything in the world. Well…everything in everyone else's eyes. Fame, money, fans, flashing cameras wherever she went. Beauty was another, but she had her doubts like she always had. When she was in middle school she hadn't felt beautiful. Far from it with all those other girls calling her fat and ugly and whatever other humiliating, cruel names that they could think of because of her overeating habits. She'd even scraped up the nerve to confront the ringleader of the daily jibes, but they only gave her the same taunts that she always received and she would retreated to the comfort and safety of her dark room to lick her bleeding wounds that never stopped.
She'd had suicidal thoughts at the young age of seven, which she knew was definitely abnormal. When she had first taken the knife to her wrists at 11 she had felt her momentary doubts before the emotional agony took over and she cut again and again. Day after day. Another slice of red for every jibe, every mocking taunt that shot her self-esteem like a hunter shoots a wounded deer. The wounds kept getting deeper and deeper, the cuts in more and more places. It was her only instant gratification from the pain. The silver of sharp metal became her best friend when she passed through into the void of internal pain that stopped her from getting help in fear of being seen as weak. The nights that she did eat she would go straight to the bathroom afterwards much to the confusion of the family and friends. Her regurgitated meal slid down the slides of the pallid sink. Then she retreated back to her room, door snapped close. She cried herself to sleep some nights. Being nothing was her greatest fear and that was how she felt.
Like nothing.
There was no purpose to her life, no reason for her to take up space. She choked on her sobs in her fitful sleeps. Unknown to her at the time, her mother or her older sister Dallas would creep into her room to whisper words of comfort in her ears, stroke and kiss her forehead gently, wishing she would reveal the source of her behavior that drove a wedge between them. Her father hardly spoke to her, save when he yelled for another drink to supply his unhealthy stupor. It hurt her like the spears that the school girls stabbed and twisted into her heart. She wanted to be loved, she wanted to be cared for. She wanted that life that she on TV shows with gentle mother and father that hugged and kissed everything better. She had half of that and half was better than nothing.
She tried to brutally shove away her growing desperation for the comfort of her father. Her mother loved her, didn't she? Or was she just another mouth to feed, someone to gain money from if the time arose? She wasn't sure anymore; she never had been. Pain burned scars into her emotional core at every step she took inside the cursed building. It felt like all looked down on her with scorn and hate. It felt like the adults - the teachers - ignored her agony when she felt it radiated from her very body, dripped on the floors and soaked the carpet of her home. What little friends that she chose to keep around her had abandoned her in fear of getting the same treatment.
Abandoned her…abandoned her like her cruel, emotionless father she thought. He didn't love her, the glass was always half empty when she needed it to be full. She cut for the taunts, cut for what she imagined never hers, and cut in the pain of the thoughts of her alcoholic father. When he was sober he was vicious and greedy, but she couldn't help trying to reach out - it was human nature. There were times when her struck her for telling him to stop. Her mother and sister would save her. They became her light-hearted saviors in the never ending dark tunnel.
But her saviors were to be kept in the dark with her, for the damsel in distress wished not to lie a heavier burden upon them; the burden of a self-harming child. So she kept to herself, always and only to herself. She forcefully stopped herself from confessing and becoming the yoke that held her few caring family members down. She wanted love and she was more than sure that her mother and sister would withdraw it once they learned the awful truth that she kept secret. Living a lie was what she had reduced herself to in her mind. Even in the light of fame, on the walkway of her dreams she was still the ugly girl in high school.
But none of it tainted her anymore.
Because she was Demi Lovato and she was unbroken.