One shots

Dancing in darkness

For the friend who set a challenge to make my writing better.

Émmene moi.-Unknown.

"Thalia you can do this."

She stared back at the woman who was staring at her in the mirror. The once lifeless honey brown eyes. The matted unwashed short brown locks that used hang dully against her face. Cheeks that were hollowed out, eyes with shadows that could be seen from a mile away. Lips chapped and blue as if she was always cold. She was. She looked ill, barely living. Inside she was dead. No feelings, numb to the world around her. The people around her all rendered to white noise. She'd escape, would try to in her head when she wasn't being violently reminded by her own vivid imagination. Her biggest enemy of all.

The words of the doctors, psychologists all would float through her head. She wallowed in the numbness for two years. Two years of where she let life pass her by. She shut off completely. Cut out all forms of friends, of contact with the outside world. She barely survived, remembering to eat at least once a day, to drink something other than her choice of poison for the night that would take her into the darkest depths of oblivion. And then one day it ended. There was no storm no big feeling of anxiety. On January 14th as the rain violently poured against the glass of her windows, she finally mustered the courage to finally look at herself in the mirror. To see that the spark she thought was completely obliterated fiercely shone somewhere in the depths of her chocolate eyes. That she could move on.

So she started small. Took regular relaxing  shower rather than trying to skin herself bare, started cleaning up the house one room at a time, she didn't even recognise her own home from the mess. She started to eat, and eat more healthy. She would count the days, the months, hours, seconds all as a new attempt to regain control. And it worked. On January 20th she took her big first step. She called her only bestfriend. Her first attempt of contacting the outside world in two whole years. They cried for what felt like forever. So much that she physically felt herself tire and fell asleep on the phone. From there she started to build a new life on step after another. One where the demons of the past would no longer have the upper hand over her. She was silently screaming the biggest fuck you at the world. And she was basking in it.

Five years. Two months. Nine hours.

She mentally counted the time. And she smiled at what she saw in the mirror tonight. She could do this. Let go wholly and lose herself in her inhibitions tonight. She would let it drop off her like the rain did off her that dark night. Like the sight of scarlet stark red tainting the innocence lost that night mixed into the tears of the night sky, and how it fell off her body, each drop trying to drag her closer to the end. She fought relentlessly. Her soul never giving up.  Today it would all be a part of her that she would finally find comfort in.

Deep breath in, exhale for longer. She repeated it once, twice, three times. Stuck another pin into her messy updo to make sure her long, freshly done honey brown hair would remain sitting there. She pulled tendrils out to frame her face, and they teasingly feathered the apples of her breasts with ever small movement. She wore minimal make up. With eye lash extensions already in she wore nothing on her eyes. The black lashes made the golden specks in her eyes shine like the rising sun. A light layer of foundation and concealer, the natural rouge of her cheeks peeped out over any product making her look the healthiest she had been in four years and flushed. Eyebrows filled in and velvety lips painted in a crimson dark wine. Satisfied she threw the lipstick into her bag.

Grabbing the dry cleaning bag on her bed, shrugging on her trench coat doing it up and throwing on a pair of boots before she moved to leave. A kiss on the forehead for her beloved dog Dax she locked up behind her, escaping into the city lights of the night.