Written in the Stars

Part 1

The glitter decorating her face is difficult to ignore. As though she was crying stardust. It drips down her face from the high points of her cheeks, hiding the sadness often painted there. Like a disguise for the ghost that floats around the party. They share the same face, and have the same gray eyes and crooked nose but they are not the same. They don't know one another. She listens to the stories from Finnley's life, reads the journals, and analyzes the pictures but they are not the same. Finnley could not choose her past self from a line-up. She has never met the girl she used to be. She's not her and Finnley's not convinced that she's ever been her. She wants to think that the glitter hides the depression. The doctor told her it's depression. The depression is caused by the accident, and the accident was caused by the rain, and snowy roads, and they are to blame for the memories that have hidden themselves in her mind. She finds it a funny thing, trying to figure out why she's depressed when she can't remember her life. When she doesn't know if the sadness was there when she was born or grew there, if she had planted it or it had poisoned her.. Sadness, anxiety and fear. Fear of not knowing if she's always been this way or if it too is the accidents' fault. If her body has simply responded to the trauma in the best way it knew to keep her alive. It's a mystery she fears she might never uncover. But she knows one thing for certain, whatever she is feeling it's always accompanied by anger.

She didn't have a limp before the accident, they tell her. She hadn't always had this dull pain that numbs her mind and ignites her nerves. She has a tattoo she can't remember getting, its meaning lost. Everyone knows there was a reason behind it but they just can't seem to remember it. She used to wear glasses, but woke up with perfect vision. She used to have a family but woke up without that.

Their photos sit on her dresser and haunt her with guilt for not remembering them. At times she finds herself sitting on her bed and staring at them for hours, searching for a resemblance in their smiles or eyes. But she doesn't find it, and she can't hear their laughter, or feel their love. It's the same way when she stares at her reflection in the mirror. She searches for herself behind the anger in her eyes. Every once and awhile thinking she's found her past self. A ghost dwelling in sleep just behind the rage. It's a deep-rooted hatred for the blue veins that bleed through pale skin, and the bump on the bridge of her nose. It's a lightness that flows through her when she hears keys of a piano, or breathes in the smell of cinnamon.

The bathroom door swings open as a crowd of young women dressed in crazy costumes file into the tiny room all laughing and complaining about how their feet hurt from dancing. As Finnley washes her hands she wonders if the girl who once lived in this body enjoyed dancing until her feet hurt but she runs into that damned wall her mind has built just past the fog. She has no answers. The doctors assure her its just her body keeping her mind safe, that this body was a warrior that had fought off death. She often wishes it hadn't. That her body had just given up so that she could be living in the same peace that her past self was. Instead, she's stuck in this perpetual hell of being unable to move forward without knowing what she's left behind. It's not fair, she thinks as she surveys the girls fixing each other's outfits and makeup happily. It's not fair that this body left who she once was on that snowy ridge beside the melted car.

They all start to crowd around the single mirror in the bathroom, all looking for a space to add more glitter to their unrecognizable faces. Finnley doesn't hesitate before she escapes the small bathroom at the back of the pub making a bee-line for her once warm bar stool.

Thumping techno music pounds through the normally quiet pub, the sound of drunk patrons singing at the top of their lungs, and the smell of sweat hanging heavy in the air.

"You look like you could use a drink!" Shayla, the heavily tattooed bartender comments as Finnley sits back in her abandoned barstool.

She nod's frantically, "I could use six!"