Silent Pantomime

Chapter 53 | Woven together, entwined

Chapter 53🌌: tw/cw- strong talk about self harm/suicide and negative self image. also sorry if this chapter is bad, i got into a slight car accident last week (kinda ironic to this chapter oh my days) so it is slightly hurting me to type, but i really want to write, so the paragraphs are very jumpy and obviously written at different times because it hurts to type for too long.🤍

I had never liked to smile much. Smiling means people can take advantage of you if they think you are happy. But I accidentally smiled a lot. Turns out, people also take advantage of you if you aren't happy. But I didn't want to smile anymore. I didn't know how to. Stitching meant nothing.

He had dyed my hair black. And because of my stupefied mouth, a gasp had no way of escaping my lips, but a scream had certainly been released in my soul. There was a black patch on the pillow, and my hair felt slightly damp, possibly from dye, definitely from tears. 

The world was supposedly full of monsters with friendly faces - and if I hadn't have been one before, I certainly was after what he had done to me. Better a monster than an arrogant angel I suppose, but still, I didn't like it. Girls get told nobody likes a mad women, as the reputation could be as permanent as the graveyard in the night's sky, so it was such a shame I was feeling mad. Don't be whiskey in a teacup, Hazel. Don't be a silver bullet in a golden gun, Hazel. Don't be ecstasy in a pile of sweets, Hazel. Whatever.

When I had woken up, with my mouth sewn shut, and my hair dyed black, there was one of the small notes with my punishment next to it: "In the end we all become stories. So do as I say before I write ' and she never made it to her happily ever after.' Lose one and use one."

Nothing even hurt as I stared at the note in front of me, and what I had to choose from. I was just mad. Numb, but mad.

Next to the note was a camera and a knife, both grey and both with sharp edges, and both equal to death. The choice should have been obvious of which one to use and which one to lose. But obvious to any sane person, not a person who ran in front of a car because she felt sociopathic in a ballgown. I picked up the knife, running the edge underneath my fingernails, while breathing uncomfortably.

Apparently as long as you care is as long as you will hurt, and as I wasn't hurting, I had assumed that I just didn't care about the punishments anymore. As previously mentioned, I was a living contradiction; and realising how I looked like a bride that was fucked in the head, and had thrown herself into a mental asylum of dripping mascara and glass before her wedding - it made me want to scratch out my scars. I didn't care about the punishments, but I cared about how I looked.

That's when I realised I really was sick.

I had seen lots of movies before, and read lots of books, where the queen could no longer turn her tears into diamonds in her crown. I didn't like the endings, but as she had never given anybody any warning signs, or given anyone even an ounce of power to read her mind, she ended. And not just her reign. Her life was over just because she forgot the Latin she was forced to be taught as a child: nexilis. It means woven together, entwined. She had wanted people to be tangled in her life without herself being caught in theirs. The only difference between me and the queens from the stories? People stayed tangled in her life.

But my ballgown had been take from me, and a hospital robe seemed better suited for my mindset. I was no part of royalty, no matter how much I had liked to pretend. Oliver and I had used to dance in the rain in Levi's, and I used to wear his shirts when I got cold. Cassidy and I once went to the beach in coats when it was snowing just to see the coast. Royals didn't wear anything other than a smart head on their shoulders and a crown to decorate it. I wasn't royal, I was just sickly suicidal about not looking like one.

I stared down at the table. One thing on it could have plunged into my chest and taken out my heart, and the other thing was the knife. No magic eyes could ever have saved me from people noticing how I now looked, and being forced to take a picture of it would have just been me owning more of my own blackmail. I also didn't think I could physically stand to look at myself, let alone have anyone else see me. I just wanted it to be a dream, or something I had made up, but this time it wasn't. I hated karma being written on my face.

I didn't want my reputation with the world and the stars to be in jeopardy, but every heartbeat of mine was jeopardising it. I wasn't a nice person, and as my pretty mask was finally off, people would have soon started to realise it. I couldn't take a photo of that, capturing the moment of my stalker's bliss wasn't something I could do. So I started to spin the knife.

The extreme always makes an impression, that's what J.D said in Heathers. His extremes were suicide pacts and blowing up schools, maybe mine would have just been killing someone who pretended to be a queen - that was extreme enough, right? It would have made an impression to the stars, that's for sure. And not everybody completely hated the queen yet, so I had to stop her breathing before her cards got burnt.

Stabbing the heart would have been the only way to save the Queen of Hearts. The knife started to spin even more on the table, reflecting its silver blades on the ceiling. Either it would have pointed to the camera, or pointed to me; I was leaving it up to the stars or fate or something. Well, not really, the spinning of the knife was prolonging my obvious choice.

The knife was getting slower as I stared at it intently, and I was mad at the knife. Strange, isn't it? Being mad at an inanimate object. It wasn't the knife's fault. It should have been a hero, it was going to save the queen. The thing is, the knife had no power, it was just there for people to lick the blood off of it, in case their love wasn't spoon fed to them. People hold the knife. People move the knife. People control the knife. So as the knife stopped spinning, and pointed to me, I would have smiled. I was going to save myself.

Unlike I had originally thought, my punishment for talking wasn't getting burnt on a stake, or getting thrown into the ocean to drown, it was just the question of whether or not I could face my truth and overcome it. And I couldn't. Nexilis: my thoughts were woven together, entwined, all tangled up so deeply that it was strangling me. I wanted to be that thought in someone else's head, I didn't want those thoughts in mine.

I wasn't just some orphan with a dad, or a girl with a dead boyfriend. I was Hazel. A pretend queen who was going to dethrone herself. I was going to be the doll with dark hair that got a knife to her chest. If extremes made impressions, I certainly would have had a reputation. You have to be respectful to the dead, so dying in such a strange way would have been artistic, in a psychotic sense.

Maybe falling was the only way to make things fall into place.

When people finally knew that I existed, all I wanted was for them to love me. Attention was what I had said I wanted, and I did, I do, but love was slightly more memorable. Love. I loved in details. But people never loved me the same. They never cared enough to ask about the violence I went through to become so gentle. Even if me being gentle was just to get love. But still, nobody loved me. So instead, I just wanted to be that person who would sit in the car at night to finish their favourite song, and say "look at the moon" and "look at the stars".

The sun started to rise as I squeezed the knife tighter in my hand. This was just going to be a love letter to the people who cared about everything too much that they forgot to care about themselves. Sometimes there was a right and a wrong time to do things, and my time had been wrong for far too long. Yours Faithfully, Hazel Fitzgerald or whatever.

And I wasn't doing this to escape from my stalker this time, I was doing this to escape from my own burdens. So I pulled the knife to hover over my chest.

Before I could even see blood, the nurse walked in and screamed.

Oh yeah, I suppose I did look like a bride that was fucked in the head, and had thrown herself into a mental asylum of dripping mascara and glass before her wedding.