Silent Pantomime

Chapter 50 | Gowns make sociopaths

Chapter 50🌌: cw/tw suicide attempts. this chapter is only part of a plot and it is all FAKE, so please please please don't hurt yourself by reading something about a character I purely made up, who lives life in a different and extreme manner. you are PERFECT 🤍 only read what makes you comfortable.

Have you ever wanted to run through of a forest in a mud stained ballgown? Because me too.

Or at least, I used to think so.

I had always wanted to waltz around in a ballgown, because dressing up can make everyone feel a little bit more romantic. Romance is everyone's weakness, because it leads to love. Even Cupid had arrows, which just proves how love doesn't always give strength, but it kills you as soon as that arrow hits you. Why else are love scenes shot like murder scenes, and why are murder scenes shot like love scenes?

But I used to love that idea, because everybody's greatest weakness was my greatest strength. If all it took to overpower someone was by dressing up, so be it. You need elegance to be remembered. I had always imagined myself dressing up in a ballgown, dancing around gracefully and getting someone to fall in love with me at first sight, because I could then run away through the forest, getting muddy, but not caring less. Because they would have been under my spell and wrapped around my little finger, before obsessing over a shoe I left behind. Hunting high and low for someone, just for loving how they looked in a dress seemed perfect to me. There is a reason why masquerade and massacre sound so similar.

But gowns make sociopaths, because once that dress comes off, what is left? No one falls for someone in rags, because satin and lace give off the romance. Without romance, there is not love, and without love, there is no power. The gowns are sociopathic because people in them think they can get away with murder as they look pretty, and I used to think so too.

My mind could never make up its mind. Sometimes I felt like throwing on a ballgown to get attention thrown at me, and sometimes I felt like I was worth more than looking pretty. Clearly I wasn't getting away with as much as I had thought, and I was scared a knife was going to come around the corner. I wasn't even sure if there was a heart for it to stab, but at least there was a soul.

The words scratched in my brain might as well have been written in blood on the walls, because they were always there to haunt me. Attention. Attention. Attention. People needed to praise me, or they still need to praise me, I'm not too sure. But no matter what, even if I hated what I was doing, attention was my life source. I needed it to function. So sociopath or not, a part of me was always wearing that ballgown.

Sometimes the dress was prim and proper, sometimes it was covered in blood, sometimes it was coated in mud, and sometimes it was drenched in rain water, but it was always on me. Even when I was genuinely happy, even if I was contemplating life, there was some elegance on me somewhere.

It would have been too hard to take off the dress I had sewn myself into over the years, but reading my mum's book had given me a new perspective. Pretty girls don't have to be bad. If I was sick, I couldn't help that, I just had to find the cure. So I decided I would be more like an angel, to fight for what was right, that would be my medicine. Seize the day, because you can fight in a dress.

Even though I had used Dilettante to fall into a fantasy to get out of my own head, it felt a lot closer to me than originally planned. Maybe I had found it for a reason, the first book I had read of Mum's showed me I was named after a witch, and the second book had shown me that everyone can fight, even witches.

The first step to finding my medicine was simple, I had to find out who was sending me these letters.

I was sick and tired of being desperate to be noticed one minute, and then just wanting a hug from my mum the next. I didn't want to be a walking contradiction, I changed my mind about things too many times just so it would bend its way to me getting attention. My gown might have ripped a bit, because what I did to that girl wasn't particularly elegant, but now I knew what it was, and now I was talking and eating against my writer's will, I had hope. Hope was a dangerous thing for a person like me to have, but I had it.