The path to recovery was more like a forest that you got lost in.
How to keep moving on.
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Sometimes she's just the same person as before, but in a different skin.
''Alright,'' the girl said, putting her hands on her, ''So, like, you wanna do this or what?''
Melodie suddenly felt very sweaty and inadequate and overheated.
''I... I don't think I gave off any signals...?''
''Oh, come ON,'' she groaned.
Melodie suddenly felt very sweaty and inadequate and overheated.
''I... I don't think I gave off any signals...?''
''Oh, come ON,'' she groaned.
''Hey,'' she texted to Astrid.
''Hey,'' she texted to Javi.
''Hey,'' she texted to Cyrus' dead phone.
"Hey," she said to the mirror, when she couldn't really recognize her own reflection.
She used to be proud of her gift, but she wasn't, anymore. Not after it hurt Xim, not after the whole pride-in-gift concept was what led to the deerstalkers. Ideology was a rabbit hole. One moment you think, hey, "this power is really cool," and then your political opinions get screwed.
At least that was her experience.
She'd never really thought of it that way before, really. Like, it was always so detached... she was someone with a gift, not a gift attached to a person. She wasn't a vessel, right? But she built her whole life around the fact that she made others uncomfortable. It was what she's born to do, almost. Not actually, of course, but there was joy in being unique and gross and weird, and maybe she developed that because she couldn't stand hating her gift and she wanted to feel something about it, at the very least.
She'd mess up, and she'd cover the walls with flesh when she breaks down. The meat was always at the peripherals of her vision, a reminder that her progress wasn't enough. It was so absurd.
At least that was her experience.
She'd never really thought of it that way before, really. Like, it was always so detached... she was someone with a gift, not a gift attached to a person. She wasn't a vessel, right? But she built her whole life around the fact that she made others uncomfortable. It was what she's born to do, almost. Not actually, of course, but there was joy in being unique and gross and weird, and maybe she developed that because she couldn't stand hating her gift and she wanted to feel something about it, at the very least.
She'd mess up, and she'd cover the walls with flesh when she breaks down. The meat was always at the peripherals of her vision, a reminder that her progress wasn't enough. It was so absurd.
She wore the necklace for about three minutes before she started hyperventilating, sick on the thought of being collared again.
She met Lily in her dream and she cried on her shoulder.
Whenever she got onto a bus she'll always look for tailing cars and suspicious people in the corner of her eye.
She realized a long time ago that she was a fundementally boring person. And it really shone now, seeing the news, where nobody ever really acknowedge that she existed, because she didn't kill anyone or get killed, and to the media, that's boring, since TV really likes blood.
That was fine with her. She liked pretending that everything was fine, sometimes, listening to music and eating ice cream with Nora, knowing that more people would've been at the porch besides her if they haven't died.
Once in a while she'll remember that she was kind of a different person before, and that the trauma had washed off the veneer of youth she always clung on to. Sometimes she'll find herself doing things that she's never done, like staring at knives for too long, or crying in the bathroom way more frequently than normal, or thinking too much about how to make sure she's never unsafe again, and she'd realized that the old Melodie wasn't really a person as much as she was a shell holding another girl who wanted a different kind of life.
"I wanted to live in interesting times," she said, "I want to see interesting things."
But she was always thinking in terms of stories to tell grandchildren and photos and documentaries and not the days, weeks, months trying to piece herself back together again.
That was fine with her. She liked pretending that everything was fine, sometimes, listening to music and eating ice cream with Nora, knowing that more people would've been at the porch besides her if they haven't died.
Once in a while she'll remember that she was kind of a different person before, and that the trauma had washed off the veneer of youth she always clung on to. Sometimes she'll find herself doing things that she's never done, like staring at knives for too long, or crying in the bathroom way more frequently than normal, or thinking too much about how to make sure she's never unsafe again, and she'd realized that the old Melodie wasn't really a person as much as she was a shell holding another girl who wanted a different kind of life.
"I wanted to live in interesting times," she said, "I want to see interesting things."
But she was always thinking in terms of stories to tell grandchildren and photos and documentaries and not the days, weeks, months trying to piece herself back together again.
She wasn't really sure what happened with her and Jenelle's head. She didn't want to know. It was a brief moment of psychosis- Melodie's therapist told her that her coping mechanisms were always sort of unhealthy from the start, and that she liked to retreat to the absurd, to fantasy, when the real world got to her too much, which was concerning because she was buried deep in the fictional all the time, and she didn't really want to think of herself as someone who was consistently bothered by reality.
She was pretty sure that she was projecting things that Jenelle embodied onto herself, and then projecting herself onto her decapitated head, because if there's one thing that she liked, it was separating herself, so that instead of being a complicated, real, multimentional person, she would be a bunch of little people wearing a trenchcoat screaming at each other.
She was pretty sure that she was projecting things that Jenelle embodied onto herself, and then projecting herself onto her decapitated head, because if there's one thing that she liked, it was separating herself, so that instead of being a complicated, real, multimentional person, she would be a bunch of little people wearing a trenchcoat screaming at each other.
Or maybe she really hated Jenelle?
So her mind worked a little like this. It didn't hate itself but it didn't want to be itself, it just thought that someone else would be a better her than her. It thinks that the world was cruel and so that she must be cruel too. It liked to be special and unique and it loved to be cared for but it was terrifed of people actually paying attention. Because then they'll see through the cracks. It liked weird things and weirder stories and being distinct. It liked being itself, but in a different way than the other way you can be yourself. It had on about fifty costumes. It sometimes thought that being murdered was attractive, because it would turn her into something greater than herself, but now it freaks out at the smallest sight of her own blood. It had trouble distinguishing between present and past tense.