writing_shadows

It was one of those moments when I realized I really hadn't grown as a person.

Oh, everyone thinks I have. Even my father decided to call me the other night from Tokyo, to tell me how proud he is of me. After all, I'm working, I've had the same boyfriend for a year and a half, and I've not been arrested since December 2009. All in all, that's a big step forward, right? My therapist looks positively smug every time I go to see him. I had to invent three suicide attempts last year just to stop him from oozing with self satisfaction.

Sometimes I think I even fool myself.

But not today.

I should really have learned from Augustin. Sometimes the world around you changes. Sometimes it changes enough that you begin to see your reflection in the eyes of those around you, and think you've become something better. He saw an old man, a wise man, a penitent, a scholar, a man of winter. He saw it, and believed it to be true. But underneath it all, he hadn't changed.

I think he and I are both the same.

I have sometimes seen something else in the eyes of others. In Lorica's eyes, I saw something good. In MacKenzie's eyes, I saw something warm. In Moorcroft's eyes, I saw something clean. And I have clung on to it, maybe more than I should. I wanted to be the girl who made Lorica laugh, even through the practised despair. I wanted to be the woman that MacKenzie looked at, and lusted after, and hurt, and bitched at, and held. I wanted to be the person that Moorcroft loved.

I fooled myself I could be that.

But right now it doesn't feel real. How the hell can it be? My mirrors are broken and gone. That demented little social group that made me warm and soft inside is fragmented. I walk into that room, and it's like walking on broken glass again. I don't belong there any more. The faces that once made me weak and soft with caring are gone. Who the fuck do I even know now?

Rex, of course. More precious than life, still, nearly the last thread that seems to hold me right now to this newborn warmth, this stupid fragile other inside me. There are others too. Jesus, I need to call Nyght or Astraea. For some reason, I miss them tonight, and my feelings for them are like another stupid worm of caring running through my heart.

But the rest of them?

I went and sat by Kieran, who sniped at me most satisfactorily. He's fucking Rosalba, I thought, and I wondered for a moment whether he had her on a pedestal as high as he had that last girlfriend of his. The lesbian one. He held my gaze a little too long, and I knew that he didn't like Rosalba enough that he'd hold back from hurting me if he got the chance.

And it was that moment, looking into his eyes, that I felt that strange and familiar sense of free fall. I hadn't grown as a person. Not really. He smiled a little, with a long slow promise of cruelty and I let myself go and just felt myself falling into the dark.