Better Than Bad

Chapter 4 || Chrome

I stripped.

My clothes tumbled off of my body in a pile at my feet, abandoned and forgotten.

The air conditioning was on, and my body had definitely noticed.

My eyes trailed from my feet to my eye level, looking straight ahead. I bit my lip.

My reflection stared back at me, and I pulled off my too-big glasses, placing them on the cold counter facing me. My vision wasn't terrible, but every time I yanked off the lenses practically glued to my eyes, the world fades into a blur, and a face that isn't an inch away from mine is a face I wouldn't recognize. I took advantage of the haze that I now saw and tried to imagine myself in a place other than the one I was in -- a place with no problems, no worries, just... peace.

That lasted three seconds before I went back to reality, half because I knew a place like that would only ever exist in my mind, and half because I had gotten bored.

I turned around and stepped into the glass shower of my and my sister's bathroom. The glass surrounding the shower had collected the fog that emerged from the scalding water precipitating from the shower head, and I allowed myself to relax in the stream of water. Somehow, the maximum heat of the shower never burned me. The second it's even a little bit cold out, though, I whip out the turtlenecks and parkas because otherwise there's absolutely no doubt that I'll catch a cold. It's called being-used-to-warm-temperatures-and-not-Virginia-weather syndrome; hot equals good, cold equals very bad.

I plucked my shampoo from the shelf built into the glass and began to massage it onto my wet scalp. I followed with the conditioner and body wash. As I stood under the shower, I started to sing. Different songs allow for different moods, and after a day of stress and incessant heart attacks, I needed something to cool down with.

Daughter (Remastered) - Pearl Jam

"Alone

Landslide

Breakfast table in an otherwise empty room

Young girl

Violence

Center of her own attention... The

Mother reads aloud, child

Tries to understand it

Tries to make her proud

The shades go 

Down

It's in her head

Empty room

Can't deny

There's something wrong

Don't call me daughter

Not fit to"

I trailed off into the chorus. My voice came out bittersweet. This song hit close to home.

"Daughter" is about child trauma and abuse within the family due to the lack of understanding and diagnosis of mental disabilities. The daughter in question during the song -- from whose perspective the song is -- has a learning disability, but nobody knows or realizes its existence. 

Tries to make [her] proud

She tries her hardest, but nobody cares.

The shades go down

She gets beaten every time she fails to learn, even though it's not her fault.

There's something wrong

Nobody knows, nobody understands. She's trapped in a cycle of beating and never learning.

Don't call me daughter