When I was born, I must have come out wrong. I must have been defective. Because the look my father gave my tiny, fragile body was enough to send me into a fit of tears, and it wasn't my mother's pleading coos nor my father's sighs which got me to quiet down, but pure and utter exhaustion. I must have been born prematurely, born with a piece of myself missing, because for as long as I can remember my hands have been as empty as my words. The other children grew up, blossoming, and I grew down, far into myself, closing off from a world I had been flung into too soon. The day I became a monster, my skin became my shield.
When she was born, she must have come out wrong. She must have been defective. Because her mother was a whore with a mean streak and her father a rich man who couldn't bear the thought of a bright, blue-eyed bastard child. She must have been born on the wrong side of the world, because a girl with sunshine hair couldn't have been conceived beneath such dismal skies. But her light only radiated outwards, and her insides were cold. She carved herself a saint's cross and strung it round her neck, casting herself in a role which none wanted to see her to play. The day she left to become a soldier, her costume became her skin.
When our paths crossed, everything was wrong. If there was a single guideline, an outline of the ideal human existence, then we were the rough drafts, the balled-up and torn-apart fragments of paper which littered the skeletons of derelict houses. Yet, when her hand slipped into mine for the first time, there it was; a tell-tale sign of life, the dull flutter of a paperweight heart. Slowly, gradually, the void within her filled the space within me. Without having ever believed either of us could, we fell in love. She was a blue-eyed goddess with a black heart, I was a dark-eyed woman masquerading as a monster, and somehow, we fit together, the matching pieces in a two-part puzzle.
You know, there's an old saying that goes "two wrongs don't make a right."
Well, we made right, left, up, down, and just about everything in between.