Silent Pantomime

Chapter 60 | Dying beauty queen

Chapter 60🌌: tw: mention of death and blood

I fainted to keep my eyes closed. It was cliché really, that I kept passing out or almost dying in an over dramatic way, almost like an author trying to make you read onto the next chapter, or a ploy a director makes so you watch the next episode. But I wasn't passing out for any applause, because the universe in my head was still believing the stars were covered in smoke. I passed out, because for the first time in a while, I was scared my eyes would let me down when I lied, because it felt that they were now see through like glass, just like every other normal person's eyes. Maybe if they broke like glass then they would have gone back to normal, but I doubted it.

Life was dumb and I wanted to sleep.

I heard somewhere that apparently happiness is the act of finally going to sleep without it being a means to escape. Screw that, because apparently people like me also think attention is love and that is why we suffer so deeply. Not once had I ever thought attention was love, it was just a shitty substitute that was what I needed to replace the lack of any emotion shown for me.

Attention could be in all forms of emotions, good attention, bad attention - happiness, want, compassion, jealousy, anger, disgust. So screw the apparent lies, because just because people say things it doesn't mean it applies to everyone. Especially me. So fuck the difference between the dire need of peace and the dire need of rest. Sometimes I wanted to close my eyes to hide, not to escape. Fuck people thinking that I manipulate because I'm dumb enough to think that that is what love is. Fuck it all.

Future Hazel, if you ever do exist, I'm sorry if I ever say some things I mean.

***

By the time I'd come back from the dead and was alive instead, I was laying down on the sofa, in the living room that now had no tacky pink curtains. An ice pack had been placed underneath my head, and I suppose in some sense I was happy it had stopped bleeding. I didn't have enough time to fully come around before I heard shrieking in my ear.

"What the hell happened to my daughter?"

That's the moment I knew that there was a dying beauty queen lied onto the sofa, because pretty perfect girls have the power to get away with whatever crap they want. The alive and vibrant beauty queens most likely feel like beheaded paupers on the inside, but I would have killed for that version of me back. Because I looked dead on the inside and dead on the outside. And corpses can't lie.

Lie, Hazel. Lie. Lie so much that you snap in half.

"She tried to steal my book," I mumbled, placing my hands over my eyes to shield it from the early morning light that had murdered the night.

I wanted to hit myself. My lie wasn't a good lie, considering the lie was true.

So I sighed and continued, "Then... then she pulled my hair."

Katherine's frame was so cold I could feel ice freeze up my veins, "So, let me get this straight, Little Miss Perfect - she pulled your hair so you pulled her life support plug?"

Come on Hazel, you spent hours thinking so you could lie. Why aren't you bloody lying?

As I thought that, I heard my dad walk in.

I decided not to answer Katherine, I was too tired for her and an interrogation, so I just mumbled a, "Hi Dad."

He also decided not to answer me, but I didn't mind, in fact, I preferred it that way.