Prose || Naked

She's standing in front of a mirror, naked. Naked like she feels in front of him. Naked like she feels when she's not around him. Naked. Naked beneath her clothes. Naked beneath the layers of clothing. Naked. She looks at herself through disapproving eyes, she looks at herself with the same scrutiny as her parents once looked at her, trying to find something pretty in her boring exterior. She was boring. Her brown eyes look back at her on the mirror, telling her it's not an illusion, it's not a lighting failure… she really is that plain, that boring.

Her body is full of bruises, full of scars, full of discolored patches of skin where hateful words bore her existence. She felt everything, every word of discouragement slapped her back, every look of disgust cut through her skin, every failure kicked her shins. Every love lost squeezed her heart. Every friend turned against her smashed her lungs. Every time her parents told her she was useless, she died just a little. Slowly, she was deteriorating. Slowly she looked even more hideous. Slowly she came to see what everyone else saw. She was useless.

She stands in front of the mirror and scowls. She can't understand why words have such power, why she's so dependent on friends, why what everyone else thinks fucks her up. She doesn't want it to be that way. She wants to mend the bruises, the scars, the tears in the skin… She wants to be able to think clearly, to be able to retreat into her thoughts without going insane. She wants to be a human being. She wants to be who she is regardless of the world. She wants to live.

Fuck the world. She's on her own.